"Your Time Is Not Your Own"

So said Brother Abraham of St. Gregory's Abbey in Three Rivers, Michigan. He was explaining to us why their day was interrupted so often by a call to prayer and worship. The lesson is economy, stewardship, and the idea that nothing, NOTHING, belongs to us, though we like to think most things do.
There is something attractive about the monastic life to me--specifically the ag. projects, though these monks only maintained a garden and harvested the copious raspberries on their property--it's probably just a romanticized ideal. The regementation, the deliberate time for study and prayer. And yet. . . I would tire of their plainsong worship. A proper reaction to God is a solemn hush--sometimes. Sometimes it should involve falling on your face weeping, others hurling every bit of energy from your diaphragm in an exultant shout. My point is, and yes I know I'm commenting on a tradition around 1,600 years old, is that our relationship with Christ is not static and neither should our response to His story.
I appreciate the monks, but I'll take a red-winged black bird over a crow any day.

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There are but three social arrangements which can replace Capitalism: Slavery, Socialism, and Property. --Hilaire Belloc The Servile State

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I Am Not Hamlet

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