Brother Alan Receives Novice Habit
July 14th, 2010
On the eve of the Feast of Saint Benedict, the community gathered in the chapter room as Abbot Stan clothed Brother Alan with the novice habit. Having completed a year as a postulant, Alan requested to advance to novice. The abbot reviewed this request with the council and Alan’s request was granted. In his remarks Father Stan commented on Alan’s journey to monastic life and encouraged Alan to persevere in living the disciplines of the life. In his life as a husband and father, Alan had responded to God’s love in a particular way. Having learned about sacrificial love in his married life, Alan came to believe God was calling him now to give himself to God in the monastic way of ceaseless prayer and following the Lord in a life apart. Drawing upon the desert tradition, the abbot spoke of an early abbot who responded to the question “What do you do as a monk?” with the words: “We fall and get up again.” The community celebrates with joy God’s work in Alan and prays in gratitude that Mepkin is being blessed with new vocations.
Here are Father Stan’s words to Brother Alan at his reception into the novitiate: 
Brother Alan, what a road you have travelled to get to this place and to ask, as you have just done, for the mercy of God and of the brothers. Fifty-six years of age certainly means that this is not the first vocation in your life. That honor must go to your vocation to be a husband of a beautiful woman, a young bride with whom you spent twenty-seven wonderful years. And your second vocation was intimately bound to the first. You have the privilege of having brought three lovely children into this world and raised them to adulthood. They are now out on their own, and you had the joy of seeing two of them married in the past year. Plus, of course, there is a fourth child whom you and your bride adopted in great love and compassion and who is now about to enter adolescence. Cyndi has remarried and Jennifer is loved and being nurtured well by Cyndi and her husband.
These two vocations have made you the person you are today and cannot be simply abandoned as if they did not exist. You have learned many, many lessons from them on what it means to love and to be loved, to care for and be responsible for young, impressionable lives. You will continue to be able to live from those lessons in your monastic life and profit your brothers with the great wisdom they have given you.
The trauma of the breakup of your marriage and the divorce caused you much pain and anguish. You grieved at the loss and struggled to make sense of it all. Gradually, through prayer and through tears, you came to hear another voice in your heart, a voice that urged you: “Life is moving on. Grief and loss will always be a part of your life, but they are not all. I do not wish you to be sad for years to come. It is time now to rise and take up a new yoke and come and follow me.” You heard this voice clearly and rather than wallow in self-pity, you leaped at this new opportunity with all your innate energy and enthusiasm.
But where? Where was the voice calling you? You tried one road and it ended in a dead end. You went down another and you heard again: “No, not here.” You heard the voice clearly, but others saw obstacles in the way. A year later someone told you about Mepkin and you came for a first visit. And another. And another. I cannot speak for Kevin or Guerric, but I saw a diamond in the rough, but more rough than diamond. Then we had our great conversation. I challenged you with all I had, and you responded in simplicity and candor on how I was misreading you. Your actions backed up your words and I was convinced that the Spirit was at work here. All any of us can do in such situations is to allow the Spirit to blow where and as he wills.
Thus you stand here before your brothers asking all we can ever ask: Mercy. God’s mercy. Your brothers‘ mercy. That is what is offered. Seize it with abandon and impetuousness. So what if you fall on your face at times. Isn’t that what monastic life is all about? Once when asked what is done in the monastery an old monk replied: “We fall and get up, fall and get up, fall and get up again.” What was true for the Egyptian desert in the 4th century is true for the lush gardens of Mepkin in the 21st. Never forget that for yourself. And just as surely, do not forget that for your brothers. They, too, will fall and get up, fall and get up, fall and get up again. True koinonia comes about only through mercy.
Finally, my brother, monastic life is not a career. It is not a job to do or a task to accomplish. Certainly there will be many tasks assigned you and to which you need to give all your energy. But this only helps you in the main thrust and purpose of our life. And what is that? It is to be made one with the Lord Jesus. Union with Christ in love is where all our focus is to be given. This will happen gradually as you empty yourself of all desires (the ancient monks and St Benedict called them your own ‘wills’) except for the one desire to be known even as you are known. Jesus knows you thoroughly. Strive to know him in this deep sense of love as well. This will come to reality as you yield yourself in all the areas of your life, the dark as well as the light, to the penetrating touch of God and the grace of the Spirit. Gradually, then, every fibre of your being will begin to vibrate with the ‘Yes‘ of your word and your life.
And so, Brother Alan, I ask you: are you ready to enter upon such an adventure and to receive the habit of a Cistercian novice monk?
