You know neither the Day nor the Hour

In today’s Gospel passage Jesus is speaking about the Second Coming. But he was not expecting his listeners to get out their planning calendars or palm pilots and fix the date. He makes it perfectly unclear: “You know neither the day nor the hour.”  And isn’t this true of many aspects of life. 
This week we are welcoming two candidates into our community: Joshua Coolman and Dan Strickland. I hope you will give them a warm welcome during coffee hour. Many of you may have met them in the past when they have been here on retreat.
When someone begins to think about monastic life, they will come for retreats and over time begin to get a feel for what the community is like. During this time of discernment, they begin to imagine what life for them would be like in the community. These are often very positive feelings and imaginings since as a guest, the potential member, or “seeker” as we sometimes say, experiences the best of the community’s hospitality. Once a person enters the community, they begin the process of learning about community life from the inside. But that learning process is not just about the ins and outs of a daily schedule of work, prayer, study and leisure, it is also a time of learning about one’s interior life. And, as that process unfolds, to use a colloquialism, “stuff” begins to come up.
And when will this happen? You know neither the day nor the hour. But you can be sure, it will happen. And dealing with that “stuff” is the grist of monastic life. It requires that the seeker, now candidate, and potentially in six months a novice, be open to what is happening. The community also needs to be ready to listen, to give guidance, to reflect back to the individual what is being experienced as seen from the professed perspective, and most importantly to be compassionate in the process. A process which is about growth in personal awareness, but also about deepening one’s commitment to the spiritual journey. And on that journey, two main pillars of monastic life, obedience and conversion, begin to do their work, if we let them.
The story of Jonah is a graphic illustration of these two “pillars” at work. God condemns the city of Nineveh and its people to destruction. He sends Jonah to warn them. As signs of repentance, the people fast, put on sackcloth and sit in ashes, as does the king. Even the animals are under the same fasting stricture. And God relents. God sees the efforts of the people and is moved by it. However, Jonah gets mad because his expectations were not fulfilled. He wanted that city destroyed! But the city and the people were saved because of their response to Jonah’s warning and because of God’s compassion. 
The people of Nineveh were a challenge to God and to Jonah. On the other hand God and Jonah are also archetypes of what is going on inside each of us, whether a new member of our community or a long time professed.  We can have both God’s response and Jonah’s response to the people of Nineveh at war inside us whenever we face challenges in our lives. What does this look like? In the Jonah story,  God offers compassion but we want revenge. God accepts repentance but we can’t let go of the hurt and anger. God is always open to our cry for help and mercy but we stop up our ears to anything we don’t want to hear. God’s wisdom is perfect but we think we know better.
The process that saved Nineveh is analogous to the process that saves us during times of stress when we are confronting challenges especially challenges to what we might call, in St Paul’s terms, our idols: challenges to our own conceptions, challenges to our expectations, challenges to our firmly held beliefs, challenges to our self-image, challenges to our upbringing.
The process of integrating new people into the community stirs up the internal contest inside the professed as well.  This is known in the literature as the unseen warfare. Its the same battle just described for the new member. This battle continues throughout our life. So as a new member grows into this life some of our challenges, or idols, if you will, are mastered, but others will emerge. Often, those challenges will force us to rethink how we are to approach relationships, hardships and even joys and achievements. In each of these, we can set up new idols that we will then worship and defend. And it is by meeting and working through these challenges that we grow.
St Paul puts all this in a different frame of reference, with the same goal. Working through challenges, we set aside our idols, reminding ourselves at every Eucharist, that we are called to one cup that binds us all together in Jesus Christ.