When Americans think of the Catholic Church, three things come to mind:
St. Patrick’s Cathedral,
Notre Dame,
Gethsemani.
Three landmarks of the American Catholic Church!
Built, not as landmarks, … but as bridges … to God.
Take St Patrick’s …
Picture, forty years before Gethsemani, a farm, three miles outside New York City,
purchased by the Jesuits for a school they gave up four years later,
turned over to Abbot Augustin LeStrange and his community of refugee Trappist monks,
who cared for thirty-three orphans until it was safe to return to France.
Whereupon, the property was abandoned, written off as a future cemetery.
Until the next bishop built a chapel,
another bishop, a small church,
his successor starting a Cathedral… interrupted for twenty-five years by the Civil War.
Finally, a fifth bishop dedicating huge proportions which completely dominated the midtown of that time.
St Patrick’s, however, was never built to be a Landmark,
but the House of God,
nourishing the faith of Catholics for future generations,
a beacon of evangelization, a sign of joy and hope,
a witness for the Catholic Church in America.
In its checkerboard history, you can see the thumbprint of God.
Or take Notre Dame.
Picture, six years before Gethsemani, the northern frontier, the wilderness of Indiana …
Fr. Edward Sorin and eight Holy Cross Brothers arriving from France at a place called “Our Lady of the Lakes,” with a clear vision: The first and finest Catholic University in America.
Picture their first school … an old log chapel used by missionary priests,
with two students, who paid … in advance … $18 a quarter for tuition and board,
including washing and mending.
Picture the Brothers working hard to make it succeed:
working on buildings and roads,
fighting mosquitoes and malaria,
surviving one failed harvest after another,
using a poor mixture of German, English, French
to attract American students and English-speaking teachers.
But they prayed, relied on God… and persevered,
finally establishing a novitiate which attracted a dozen men the first year.
They’d been struggling for seven years, when news of the Gold Rush came,
and Fr Sorin saw the solution to their money problems,
so four Brothers were sent West on an expedition to bring back the gold.
Sadly, one Brother left the community in California, another died,
only two returned the following year, empty-handed … nothing to save the floundering school.
The cruelest twist of all, however, 30 years after their arrival,
fire leveled many of the campus buildings.
Fr Sorin, 30 years older, looked over the burnt-out remains and announced:
“I dreamed too small… we will begin again, and build bigger.”
You have to look past Our Lady atop the Golden Dome,
past the “Fighting Leprechaun” and the motto: “God, Country, Notre Dame..”
and you see hardships, setbacks, scars, side by side with faith and love.
But you see God’s Hand right there with them,
as their history unfolded.
Or take Gethsemani … “Proto-Abbey of the New World.”
We’re not buildings, we’re a Community.
We’re the heirs, the offspring of those who went before us.
Scientists ask why children today are usually taller than their parents,
answering: heredity, chromosomes … genes.
They say: Each of us is the labor of our forebears…
what our father thought, what our mother prayed for.
We are their hopes, their sicknesses, their healings.
We are their loves, their struggles, even their sins.
All that is wrapped up inside us!!
Likewise, we monks have 170 years of Gethsemani’s life in our blood.
We are what we are because our ancestors were what they were.
Our faith has the stamp of their faith,
Our hope …the strength of their hope,
Our love … the intensity of their love.
They came here with an age-old blueprint, handed down from St Benedict,
laid out a place of “Ora et Labora,”
a house of prayer, a School in which to learn the Lord’s Service,
a healing place, a Hospital for sinners,
a home where brothers live together and work out their salvation.
Not only did they blaze the trail,
clear the land into pastures and gardens,
quarry foundation stones, make the bricks to raise these walls,
cut the trees that hold up this roof …
they had to survive failed harvests, financial reversals, hardships and setbacks,
they prayed for vocations to increase their numbers.
After thirty-five years of building, a devastating blow.
The grain mill – their major source of income and nourishment – burned to ashes.
The following year, however, the community received its first lifelong American monk, a former cowboy from Texas, Brother Joachim Hanning, “The Man Who Got Even With God.”
Through it all, good times and bad, they held on, kept up their faith and hope in God.
Today we admit they were giants,
we need to climb on their shoulders to see what vision kept them going,
how they lived out the gospel, how they saw God’s plan for salvation being worked out.
That’s what monastic tradition does.
One generation, with its struggles and prayers, its faith and example, feeds the next generation. In God’s grace, whole new generations spring up, we continue to grow.
Today we acknowledge that if Gethsemani be a landmark,
we didn’t build it, or start it ourselves … we’re the heirs.
We owe a huge debt to the 275 monks buried in our cemetery,
names and faces still with us:
Dom Edmond Obrecht, as much a giant among Abbots as his Ginko Tree out front,
Br Victor, who ran our cheese operation for 40 years,
Br Martin, master plumber and candlemaker,
Br Camillus, cook and shoemaker,
Br René, true son of Mary and her Rosary, our first fudge-maker,
Fr Chrysogonus, liturgist, scholar, teacher,
Br Giles and Ephrem – architects and builders,
Fr Herbert, Father-Master for so many of the Brothers,
Fr Louis, one of the ‘four most influential Americans’ of Pope Francis…
But they did way more than their work assignments suggest:
They prayed here, they built the place up, they persevered,
and just by living here … shaped the spirit of the place,
then handed everything over to us, in a simple bequest:
Be faithful, keep the place going, pass it on.
A truer picture of Gethsemani should be, not as a landmark,
but as a place we’re continuing to build, one generation at a time,
a house of prayer,
a place where we give back to God.
That was their vision and blueprint.
What better can we do today than give thanks to God and to our founders,
acknowledge our debt to them,
and pledge anew to be faithful and follow in their footsteps.