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blessings.
    At morning prayer, the psalms seem suited to the archangels. Psalm 29, for Michael, the power of God: “The Lord’s voice resounding on the waters, the God of Glory thunders; the Lord on the immensity of waters . . .” And for Gabriel, Psalm 25, a quiet prayer of hope and trust. For Raphael, a psalm that I love, 147: “The Lord builds up Jerusalem, and brings back Israel’s exiles. And heals the broken-hearted; and binds up all their wounds.”
    Michael—who is as God; Gabriel—God’s messenger; Raphael—God’s healing. They say what angels always say, “Do not fear.”

THE
DIFFERENCE

    Once, as I was preparing an omelet, I turned to the friend standing in the kitchen of my apartment at the Ecumenical Institute and asked him, “How do you like your eggs?” I glanced up from chopping green onions to find him looking dazed but pleased, as if I had just suggested that we run off to Paris for the weekend. “You know,” I said, puzzled by his silence, “runny or well-done?” And then it hit me: he’s a monk, which means that no one ever asks him how he likes his eggs. For most of his adult life he has dined communally, eating whatever is put before him.
    My monastic friends are often at pains to counteract the romantic image of the monk or nun, insisting, rightly, that they are ordinary people. Every once in a while, however, the difference asserts itself, a reminder of the fact that the monastic world is not like the world that most of us inhabit. To eat in a monastery refectory is an exercise in humility; daily, one is reminded to put communal necessity before individual preference. While consumer culture speaks only to preferences, treating even whims as needs to be granted (and the sooner the better), monastics sense that this pandering to delusions of self-importance weakens the true self, and diminishes our ability to distinguish desires from needs. It’s a price they’re not willing to pay.
    But in a consumer culture, monastic people must be vigilant, remaining intentional about areas of life that most of us treat casually, with little awareness of what we’re doing. One year at the American Benedictine Academy convention, an abbot, speaking on the subject of “The Monastic Archetype,” suddenly dropped all pretense to objectivity and said he was troubled by the growing number of cereals made available for breakfast in his community. “How many kinds of cereals do we need,” he asked, “in order to meet genuine health needs without falling into thoughtless consumerism?” The audience of several hundred Benedictine men and women broke into applause, obviously grateful that he’d captured, in one seemingly trivial example, an unease that many of them share about the way they live in contemporary America. One monk, a former abbot, said that he wasn’t as concerned with the number of cereals available as he was with the cafeteria-style of eating adopted by his community. “When we serve ourselves,” he said, “we do not exemplify monastic values.” He wondered if eating family-style, sharing from a common bowl, waiting to be served and then to serve one’s neighbor, was a practice monastic people could afford to lose.
    A friend who is a retired corporate executive, and a Benedictine oblate, has pointed out to me that monastic, family-style management differs greatly from management as practiced by a corporation. While this difference sometimes results in Benedictines raising inefficiency to an art form, I’ve come to value the monastic witness to a model of institutional behavior that is not “all business,” that does not bow down before the idols of efficiency and the profit motive. Now that corporations are constructing ready-made “communities,” in the form of gated and guarded suburban enclaves, the difference between monastic community and corporate