I visited the monastery again last weekend.
It had been about a year and it was good to return, if but briefly. As I've explained before, these trips are not very restful or vacation-like, but rather good for retreat and reflection in a world as full of sound and fury as ours. I was able to find some moments of peace for contemplation and during that time a thought struck me: that the monastery, despite its humble appearance, was the least politically correct place on Earth.
This sounds odd, at least to those who weren't already looking for a way to pounce on a group of consecrated monks, studious young men, and energetic high school boys living frugal lives on top of a windswept hill in Mission, B.C. What I mean to say is that the formation of young men into competent adults has become anathema in much of our world today; and given their promise to abstain from worldly goods or family life, they won't help the economy much, either.
Thus, left and right politically correct behaviors will be outside of their conduct, and actually might explain the vehemence with which the world has resisted the consecrated life, monastic communal living, and even priestly celibacy. In every century, revolutions on the right and the left have tried to dispossess the church of not only her lands and buildings where she forms her servants, but of the very disciplines and teachings that shape them in her womb.
Perhaps I'm stretching this observation - and I'm sure many would like to point out the abuses that mother church's servants have visited upon those within and outside her walls. I cannot counter these arguments with anything but begging for forgiveness on behalf of my brothers and sisters, as well as myself. Yet the day we all forgive one another's trespasses is the same day our stocks in worldly resentment and consumption will also be worth nothing.
That sounds an awful lot like the Kingdom of Heaven - where there is no division or strife, where swords are ploughshares, where the first are last, where the weak are lifted up. It's a place that conflicts with our very modern hearts: it sounds wonderful, but it gets more terrifying every time we store up greater provisions for our plans on Earth. None of us is born selfless: and seeing others dedicate their lives to it often brings out our suspicion, instead of our holy wonder.
As I left the monastery, the overwhelming evidence was that depravations and pursuits shunned by our world didn't make anyone clinically depressed. Instead, joy and contentment appear to reign supreme; I'm not sure a more politically incorrect attitude exists anywhere else.
