Speaking of Faith by Tippett Krista

Author:Tippett, Krista [Tippett, Krista]
Language: eng
Format: mobi

I began to find my way to do this at a Benedictine monastery, Saint John’s Abbey, and its sister community, Saint Benedict’s, down the road in central Minnesota—a part of the world I would once have imagined as the middle of nowhere. These Benedictines were, after my heart, contemplative and industrious at once. Ora et Labore is their motto—worship and work, simultaneous and inextricable. They live and teach, publish and pray on prairie their German forebears settled in 1856 in the midst of a devastating plague of grasshoppers. They take great pride in the fact that their order began in the sixth century, predating the major divisions of the church, and they draw ethical sustenance from a generous, sacred, not quite linear view of time. I emerged from divinity school with a sense of the vastness and relevance of the theological enterprise—the human search for words about God, and lives crafted in their resonance. But I could not find these aspects of religion visible in our public life. I could not find a way to trace their imprint until I fell down Collegeville’s contemplative rabbit hole.

In the decade of my birth, the 1960s, while political America was protesting, loving not warring, warring not winning, dreaming spaceships and grieving, these monks were building. They lent creative genius to the liturgical renewal of the Roman Catholic Church before and after Vatican II, word of which had not reached my Southern Baptist childhood. They built a manuscript library that is becoming the world’s greatest repository of formerly buried monastic treasures, now catalogued in microfiche and digital files for present and future generations. As it happens, Collegeville was also the birthplace in 1967 of my current employer, Minnesota Public Radio/American Public Media, which became a media phenomenon with a talent of comic brilliance, Garrison Keillor, and an entrepreneurial leader, a Saint John’s alum named Bill Kling. But I first came under the spell of another, less media-savvy Saint John’s progeny, a place of ecumenical conversation and research now called the Collegeville Institute. It remains small and quiet by choice, and has done mighty works in the world.

In 1995, I first spent a summer week at the institute. With fourteen soon-beloved strangers, I sat around a plain round conference table that I came to imagine as a rival, or at least a counterpart, to those self-important strategic conference tables of Berlin. Here, life and death, mystery and meaning, were all on the table. We engaged in a simple, life-changing exercise of reflecting on theological questions by looking back at our lives. That can sound reductive, and strictly personal. But time and space become more generous when we explore ultimate truths in the presence of others. “Thin places” open up. This experience is had in churches, synagogues, mosques, and temples all the time. It happens among friends and in marriages and at hospital bedsides. We make the discovery that when we are honest and vivid and particular in describing what is most personal and important in life, we can summon universal and redemptive places at the very edge of words.

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