Dear Brothers and Sisters – You who are our guests today may think it scandalous, but our community watches movies several times a year. Our Christmas movie this year was “Lion,” l-i-o-n. It’s the true story of a young man who literally lost his family in India – he became separated from them at five years old when he fell asleep on a train that took him nearly a thousand miles from home. He was put in an orphanage, and then adopted. When he reached adulthood, he became obsessed with finding his original family. I’m probably not giving too much away when I tell you that he eventually found them – after all, there wouldn’t be a movie otherwise. The brothers who saw the movie said that it was very affecting. I heard some sniffling in the room, not least from myself.
In the discussion afterward, Fr. James pointed out that this sort of story, a quest story, is effective, is touching, because it reflects our own search for a true home. We may come from relatively happy families, we may have a happy family of our own, but there is still something that calls us past that, past the home we knew as children or the home we have built or found as adults. There seems to be innate in us a longing which is never entirely satisfied with a material home, however comforting it may be. Fr. James said that as humans we are built to long for something beyond what this world can ever offer us.
There is another movie that many of you may have watched this past Christmas season. In “It’s a Wonderful Life,” George Bailey longs for something that seems to be out of his reach. He thinks that this longing will be fulfilled by going out into the world and accomplishing big things. But every time he is on the brink of beginning what he thinks is his real destiny, circumstances get in the way. His unfulfilled ambitions and frustrated dreams eventually lead him to contemplate suicide. He thinks he knows what that great longing inside him is for, but he is mistaken.
That we have this great longing within us can be disconcerting. We might experience it as a great emptiness at our centre which can never be filled. The presence of this hole inside us can be very painful. Some of us try to fill this hole with various things or activities. These can be relatively harmless, we may become an obsessive collector of model trains or china figurines. We may believe that this person or that will fill our longing, and the first flush of love may seem to do exactly that. However, most of us eventually discover that, even in a relationship, we are still fundamentally alone. The quest to fill this hole may drive us to succeed in business, or in politics, or conversely, it may lead us to give up, to become a loner, or even a criminal. And this hole can be so painful that some of us turn to addictive substances to mask its presence. At its extreme, it can drive us to suicide, when the pain of simply living from one day to the next with this emptiness inside becomes intolerable.
However, there is another way to look at this hole inside us. As we said before, this emptiness is caused by a great longing. In fact, the emptiness IS our longing. It is our desire, our true desire. This week, we are having our community retreat, and we are privileged to have Bishop Eric Varden with us, a Cistercian like us, to give us our conferences. In his first conference on Friday evening, he said that our waiting IS our desire. The emptiness, therefore, is the gap between now and the time to come, the gap between our lives as they are, our selves as incomplete and contradictory, and the assumption of our true natures, as unique and shining like the sun.
So, we’re right to feel that we are not like everybody else, that we don’t quite fit in, because we are unique, one of a kind. I heard about a guy starting an AA talk once by saying, “I’m just like all of you. I’m different.” Our uniqueness need not be a cause for despair, but for celebration.
St. Paul reminds us of this. He lists the various ways which God can use us, the various gifts we possess. The one with the gift of prophecy is not the same as the one with the gift of healing. The one with the gift of wisdom is not the same as the one with the gift of mighty deeds. But all are necessary. And as he says elsewhere, the hand should not want to be an eye, or the foot a head. We are built to be a certain thing, and no one else is built in exactly the same way.
Isaiah shows us how our desire will be fulfilled. God reassures Israel that it will one day be secure and prosperous. “No more shall people call you ‘Forsaken’ or your land ‘Desolate,’ but you shall be called ‘My Delight,’ and your land, ‘Espoused.’” Notice that Israel does not accomplish this by its own grand deeds or fine merits. God accomplishes it through grace, simply because God “delights in you.” Grace is the manifestation of God’s delight in us.
In our Gospel, Jesus changes water into wine as the first sign of his divinity in John’s Gospel, the first revelation of his vocation. In doing so, he demonstrates one of the main characteristics of his vocation – transformation. Let’s look at the jars in the story. They’ve been made for a purpose, to hold water, but are not at the moment fulfilling their vocation. Note that the jars don’t have much agency. They don’t fill themselves. They are filled through Jesus. Their job was to stand empty, to wait, to endure the discomfort of their unfulfilled yearning. But then, by waiting, by yearning, they are filled to the brim, right to the top. But things don’t stop there – Jesus’s gift, his grace, goes beyond their expectation. The water is turned into wine. They are given their real vocation – to be vessels of transformation.
As humans, as monks, we are not quite as passive as stone jars, but the principle is the same. God has made us to be unique individuals, to serve a unique purpose. If we can discern and cooperate with that purpose, which is a lot of hard work, and find our vocation, we can be happy and content with our lives. Chances are, we are already doing God’s work, but we may not know it. We may think that our lives are routine, ordinary, and unfulfilling. Like George Bailey, we may be dissatisfied, sure that we have been kept from our real vocation by poor decisions or missed opportunities which continue to haunt us. But after all, George’s real vocation was to help the people around him, to bring new life into the world, to love Mary his wife, simple things which he was already doing. It took an angel, grace personified, to show George who he really was, how he was built, to show him his real desire. God’s will for us is not some great mystery, out there somewhere, where we are not. There is no contradiction between God’s will for us and our own deepest desire for ourselves. In fact, they are the very same thing.
As monks, we’ve been fairly conscious about our vocation. We’ve chosen a relatively uncommon path, and we’ve vowed to stay on this path for the rest of our lives. That doesn’t mean that our struggles are at an end, of course. We will have bad days, we will be irritated with our brothers, we may sometimes even feel that our lives are ordinary, obscure, and laborious. But we are also conscious at times that God has been at work in us. The hole at our center will never be entirely filled in this world, but we may be surprised that a certain vice no longer has a hold on us, or that this brother who used to drive us bonkers is actually a kind and generous soul. We begin to recognize that our yearning and desire is actually a capacity for love, love of God and of our brothers and sisters. We have become vessels of transformation. God is slowly filling our emptiness, our waiting, our desire, with the water of life, the water of compassion, which will be transformed, in his time and by his doing, into wine, the very blood of Christ in us.