Monk on a Mission: Abbot Dan Nobles on Contemplative Prayer (Part 2)

This week, we continue both our Monastic Wisdom for the Marketplace series and our interview with Dan Nobles, OSB, Abbot of Christ Mission Anglican Benedictines and hiker-photographer of America’s trails as Wandering Monk. (See our previous interviews with Caleb Iler of Journeymen Plumbing and Dan Bovey, bivocational pastor and landscaper.)

In Part 1, Abbot Dan shared about how he unexpectedly became a monk and the healing journey of contemplative prayer. Here in Part 2, he speaks about the real point of Benedictine prayer practices, the step-by-step discernment of new monastic vocations, practicing Lectio Divina while hiking, and how monks and nuns guard the church in prayer.

Chris Easley: Tell us about the practices of your community.

Dan Nobles: We have our breviary for the Order that we use and the liturgies are here and they’re beautiful. And if you can do these, one of the things it does for you is that the Psalms become your friend very quickly.

So, if you're doing all the prayers seven times a day, seven days a week, in this breviary, every two weeks you will complete 150 Psalms.

CE: Wow. Every two weeks. So you're going through the whole Psalter about twice a month.

DN: Yes.

CE: I think I make it through the Psalter about once a year!

DN: But that's okay. That's the thing—it takes us a while (and if I say something that becomes offensive, I apologize in advance) but it takes us a while to unchurch: to take the expectation off of myself, the judgment off of myself. To learn that what I'm really after, and what God is really after, is a relationship with us.

And we impose a lot of things on ourselves, and so it takes about two to three years to get someone who is really zealous about Benedictine spirituality to sort of calm down enough to unchurch them a little bit, if I can use that word!

CE: I think I get what you're saying, that it's so easy to approach any kind of spiritual practice with a kind of desire to do it really well, a desire to achieve even, and that's not the real point. It's to meet the Lord in the practice.

DN: Exactly. And if we do it well, there is great blessing in it. But there's great blessing in just taking that first step.

We don't need to put all of that burden on us. That's not the intent of this life.

I describe the process of becoming a fully or “perpetually” vowed Benedictine in their steps [like this]:

You have an Aspirant that comes in, and I equate that to window shopping. They're walking down the street, they walk by a clothing store, and in the window, they see a jacket. So they stop, and they think, I might like that jacket.

So then they enter the store. When they go in the store, and they feel the material, and they look at the cut of the jacket, they become a Postulant: someone who's just wanting to know what is there: There's 73 chapters of the book! Really? I’ve got to know 73 chapters?

Now, they don't realize that some of those chapters are like three sentences long. But as they look at that in this Postulancy stage, then they decide, You know, I want to try it on. I want to see if it looks good on me.

So they take it off the rack and they put it on. Well, that's the Novice stage. The Novice is the first person who takes vows. It's the first vows that they ever take.

And we all take the same vows. It's vows of obedience, that I'm going to obey something besides myself.

It's vows of stability, that if something offends me, I don't cut and run. I'm going to stay here with this. I'm going to weather the storm. I'm going to be stable, which is very different than our society.

And then there's a vow of cruciform life, which is probably the most difficult, but it really is the product of the first two—Cruciform life, that I empty myself of myself and I allow Christ to fill me. I become formed by the cross of Christ.

So we take those three vows as a Novice, but it's for a year. So I've got an escape clause.

I haven't bought the jacket yet.

CE: You’ve still got the receipt?

DN: I'm walking around the store. I haven't even put out any money yet!

Then I decide that I want to take it out of the store. I want to take it home with me. I take Junior Vows. And these are the same vows as Solemn Vows, except once again, it has an end clause on it. It has an escape clause on it. So it has a guarantee: I take the coat home and I wear the coat. I've paid for the coat. I'm wearing it, but I always have a full refund guarantee.

CE: Got it. So the Junior Vows is when you've got the receipt and you're waiting.

DN: And then once I try it on and I say, You know, I don't ever want to take this jacket off. I want to sleep in this jacket. I want to eat in this jacket. I never take this jacket off. Then I take Solemn Vows. That's when I throw the receipt away, because I'm taking vows to God that this is the way I will live my life.

So we go through this process with everyone new on the vocational side, the Brothers and the Sisters. We go through this journey. Usually it takes about three to five years.

There's no timestamp on it. The person—I don't sit here and hound them and say, “You know, it's about time you take your next level of vows!” I don't do that. They have to come up with that. They determine when it's time, which is okay. It's God's time.

Also, if they leave, it's not like they have betrayed us. We've been blessed by their presence while they've been with us. And we hope that we have blessed them with ours. So I've written a blessing for those who leave the order to bless them in their journey, wherever it takes them. They're walking with God.

So in this journey that they go on, to be a Benedictine is not salvific, but it's a great way of journeying into the depths with the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.

CE: I love that gradual discernment of a monastic vocation where there's no pressure. It's not a guilt thing or an achievement thing.

It's: "Does this fit? Is this the right path for me to stick with as my way of maintaining that walk with Jesus, with this community?"

DN: Exactly. It really is organic. It needs to grow up from within us.

It's not a matter of earning or a matter of trying to be orthodox enough.

CE: I was wondering if you could talk a little bit more about the vows and specifically the cruciform life.

I know often the phrase “conversion of life” is used, or “reformation of life,” for that vow. I really love how you use the cross as the image. So, what does it mean to enter more deeply into a cruciform life for a Brother or a Sister or an Oblate?

DN: It really goes back to what I talked about at the beginning on kaleō, on calling. The more we enter a cruciform life, the more my personal objectives, my personal desires, my ambitions, my goals . . . they're not just suppressed. They're released. They're emptied so that he can fill me with himself.

There's sort of a joke. It's an old monastic joke that a young man came to an old monk and he said, “I want you to teach me.”

And the monk said, “What do you want me to teach you?”

“I want you to teach me how to pray and I want you to teach me specifically how to pray like a Benedictine. I want to know how to pray the seven offices. I want to know how to get a heart of prayer. I want to be filled with prayer. I want to pray. Teach me to pray.”

And the monk said, “I can't teach you. Go away.”

So he goes away for a year and he comes back a year later and he says, “I want you to teach me.”

And the monk says, “What do you want me to teach you?”

He says, “Just make it simple. Just teach me to pray. However you want to teach me to pray, teach me to pray.”

And the monk says, “I can't teach you. Go away.”

He comes back the third year and he says, “I want you to teach me.”

And the monk says, “What do you want me to teach you?”

He says, “I have no idea.”

The monk says, “Sit down. I can teach you.”

CE: “Now you're ready.”

DN: Yeah.

When we empty our ambitions, our expectations, we're going to really just step into life. 

That's why Lectio is such a beautiful format. Because [first] we read Holy Scripture, just to hear it, just to hear the words.

And then we read it a second time and we're looking for [how] the Spirit is going to pop out and into our mind of what he's drawing out of us. And we dwell on that.

We read it a third time and now we can respond back to that aspect that the Spirit has brought out to us.

We read it a fourth time and that time we're not trying to understand it. We're not trying to discern it. We're just resting in it.

That's the way I began hiking actually. I would get up in the mornings and as I would start, when I was doing a long hike—say I'm hiking through the Smoky Mountains—you get up in the morning, you start walking, not expecting to see anything, but just observing everything.

And then about halfway through, you start thinking, Okay, so what was that bear doing? And why was he there? And what was going on with that? And how did I receive that and perceive that bear?

And then at lunchtime, what I would usually do is I would respond to that. So all afternoon, I would respond, Okay, Lord, you know, you show me that. And it was pretty spectacular.

I wasn't too scared, but I was a little bit, just sort of talking through that with God.

But when I would hit the bunk at night, when I would put my tent out and lay down in my bag, I would just sleep, sleep in the day. And so it will inform all aspects of your life.

So, whether you're a vowed monk or whether you're living in monastery, or whether it's just your daily job, you can do it with the same structure, the same order, and receive blessing.

CE: It strikes me as you describe that experience hiking that it doesn't require something extreme or something impressive. It just requires an openness to God showing up.

God can show up on a hike. God can show up while we're checking our email. God can show up while we're doing the dishes. And those are all things that even the vowed members of your community are doing, because they have day jobs and some of them, like you, have family responsibilities as well.

So, it's not about not having those everyday activities. It's about a committed way of welcoming God's presence in them.

DN: That's true regardless of whether we're in monastery or whether we're dispersed, because the monk in the monastery is doing the same thing:

They have their prayers. They go work.

They have prayers. They have a period of study.

They have prayers. They have chores to do.

I've had young Brothers and Sisters say, “You know, it'd be so much easier in the monastery.”

I tell them, “Don't look at it quite that way.”

Parts of it might be, but even godly monks living in the monastery together probably have some personality conflicts. It's going to happen. So there are things that we work through regardless of whether we're cloistered or whether we're dispersed.

Rather than looking at someone else, the best thing to do is just look at your situation where you're at, because that's where God wants to meet you.

And he really does. Everything gets back to that.

Why do we do anything? We do it because God wants to have a relationship with us.

So we look to see: Where is he working? What's he doing? We pray for eyes to be able to see it and ears to hear his voice. If we do that and join him where he's at, there's relationship rather than, “I'm praying for him to bless my plans.”

God has his plans. God is God. I'm not.

He's not a genie that I can rub in the bottle. He's God.

So my plans are nothing. His plans are perfect.

If I can trust him, I can have that blessing of relationship with him. That's cruciform life.

CE: It strikes me as just a beautiful image—that it's not so far removed from the life of the everyday Christian, the experience that you and your community have.

DN: It really isn't. It's just a different structure. There's a different way of looking at it.

We may have different language. Words become so important. Language is so important.

To be able to express thought, we have to have language. I think of Helen Keller. I'm from Alabama, and I grew up in northwest Alabama, and so Helen Keller's home was very close, and so she was always sort of an icon of our community there.

In one of her books, one of her biographies, she wrote about the importance of language, and she said, until she had language, she couldn't dream. She saw nothing. When she slept, there were no images.

There were no dreams until she had language, and then language gave her the ability to dream. I think of that a lot. 

So, that may be one of the biggest contributions of religious life, of Benedictine life, is it gives us a language. When we look at the seven offices, they're the same seven offices that the Roman guard used to guard the city. The church took that so that we would have these watch times to place guard around the church. So, as we're praying these seven hours, we're praying to cover the church in prayer.

The beauty of being dispersed—there's a lot of challenges to it—but I think the beauty of it, since we are worldwide, is when I finish praying Lauds, I know that a Brother or a Sister in the next time zone is picking it up to pray again, and so when we hear the words of “pray without ceasing” (1 Thessalonians 5:17), it takes on a whole new meaning. It doesn't mean that that burden is all mine. I share that burden across the world, and so we continue to pass that baton on. We truly do pray without ceasing because we share one another's burdens. That’s one of the benefits.

Another benefit I would hope that the church sees is that [a monk] is a prayer warrior. So, if they have a Benedictine Brother or Sister or Oblate in their parish, they have a prayer warrior that's covering the church with prayer. Don't see them as some kind of strange entity. They are a resource, and so to leverage them for what they are.

CE: The name of St. Benedict, founder of the Benedictine order, has to do with blessing, like the word “benediction.” So, I was wondering if you could pray a prayer of blessing to end our time for everyone who's been part of this.

DN: I would be glad to.

In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.

Almighty God, we praise your name.

You alone are worthy of honor and glory.

And Father, now I pray your blessing upon Chris as he presents this to an audience. I pray your blessing upon the audience that hears it.

May they have ears to hear your voice. Lord, give them eyes to see your face. Give them hearts to desire.

Father, I pray their blessings. I pray that you give them peace. The peace that can only come from you. The peace that passes all understanding.

I pray in the name of our Lord Jesus, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forevermore. Amen.

Interview edited for clarity and length.

Post photo courtesy of Wandering Monk / Dan Nobles.

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