A LAY CISTERCIAN’S NEW YEAR’S RESOLUTION: MAKING ALL THINGS NEW

Each year, I have made a New Year’s resolution, and my resolve lasts about two days. Mostly, it is about losing weight. Good intentions, poor execution on my part. This yearly ritual has lulled me into an insensitivity to the importance of making and keeping what I choose to do to better myself. In all actuality, I realized I was talking about converting myself, once again, to that which makes my humanity more than its animal antecedent. I have human reasoning for a reason, as I can choose YES or NO to what I place as a value in my life. Like any habit, I do it so often that I become seduced by its intrinsic repetition. In short, it becomes routine and without either awareness or its consequences.

Once again, when I became a Lay Cistercian, I started over with my resolve to do whatever it was that Lay Cistercians do to become more Cistercian. As so many times before, I began anew my resolve to be a better person, so go to Church more, to keep the Lay Cistercian practices, as if they ended in themselves and not pathways to a deeper mystery that would excite my humanity. This, I described later on in my personal Lay Cistercian Way, was a daily martyrdom of being aware that I was aware of the extraordinary physical and mental encounters I face each day, each moment. Without tripping over my own feet to become something I am not, a religious fanatic who does anything for the sake of anything, I learned to balance my experiencing life as a citizen of the world (St. Paul) and an adopted son (daughter) of the Father, not as I want it to be, but as it is. What is good? I began to assimilate into my worldview of what it means to be human. New words, such as “adoption,” “abandonment,” “silence and solitude,” and “conversio morae and capacitas dei,” not only began to redefine my paradigm of the psychopathology of Catholicism that I had developed and had adopted as “normal,” but was the endpoint of being human. What was bad for my progression as a human being was that I began to term my “false self,” all the while gaining an awareness that my Catholicism was merely a school of love, as St. Benedict would term the monastic way he wrote in his Rule. I realized that life is a process of filling myself with new wine and constantly changing wineskins so that this new wine would not become vinegar.

I began to be aware that I had always had a place in my inner self, one where I did not think of entering because it took work and demanded that I focus on another other than myself. This is the place I fear most in all the world, a place where I had to confront those three life lessons that I must assimilate to become more human, a place where I had to let go of the world (citizen of the earth) to place myself in the presence of pure energy, pure knowledge, pure love, and pure service, and then wait with no agenda of my own. These three challenges for each human are:

• Discern what it means to be fully human as nature intended.
• Learn how to love fiercely.
• Discover the meaning of truth and the freedom that accompanies it.

The answers for each of us come from our lifetime experiences and choices. The problem is that there are good choices that take our human evolution to the next step, and there are bad ones, those where we miss the mark either partially or totally. The question for me becomes, “What is the template, the key, the cornerstone that will allow me to begin to process my humanity authentically?”

My own humanity, although a great vacuum sweeper of all things I encounter, is not strong enough nor mentally competent to give me that answer. So, what do I do? Just sit in the ambiguity of the contradictions and false pathways of being human? I have human reason for a reason; plus, I have the mental hunger to be aware that the answers I seek must come from a source not tainted by original sin. I am not you, and you are not me. We each get a crack at the key that unlocks the equation of these three questions above.

I have come to discover (John 20:30-31) that Jesus is the Principle against which I discover how to open what, to those who only limit their notion of reality to the physical and mental universes, is the way, what is true, and what life is for those who move to their next level of evolution. For me, and again, I only speak for my life experiences, I am in the process of becoming more human each day, I continue to seek to love with more than just human love, but dare to reach out to the divine nature, because I have first been selected and ratified it in my heart, that my destiny is the kingdom of heaven on earth while I live, and the continuation of my movement and complexity in the kingdom of heaven with Christ…without corruption and with the attainment of the highest potential of my humanness. Mary is the archetype of what it means to be fully human, love fully, be at one with what is true, and be free.

Where Mary was filled with the Holy Spirit all at once, I also have the opportunity to be filled with that same spirit, but I must seek it daily and be aware that I am aware that placing myself in the presence of a nature beyond my own, without doing anything or thinking anything beyond the supreme privilege of having the real presence of Christ in my tabernacle of the Arc of the covenant in my temple of the Holy Spirit. Nothing I do can make this happen; in, with, and through Christ, I can go to the Father as an adopted son and say Abba. I can approach the mystery of Faith so deep that I will never reach its heights or depths while I live. Like St. Paul, I only glimpse what is to come while I sit in silence and solitude in my upper room and wait for the Lord. I don’t need to prove any of this to anyone. In fact, I can’t.

Because I still wobble around with the trappings of my humanity while I am alive, each day I find myself packing for the trip to forever. My bag is my life and those lessons Christ has taught me that make it through the microfilter from human life to eternal peace. As a Lay Cistercian, with my unique approach to what I think Cistercian spirituality, with its practices and charisms, is, I seek simplicity in my Catholic faith home, wrapped in the centuries of those who traveled to their upper rooms to give honor and glory to the Father. Like Mary, the Church is a mother that soothes my bumps and bruises and bids me not lose focus.

And, finally, we come to my resolution for this year of making new skins for the new wine and bread Christ shares with me each day. I make my resolution, hopefully, every day in my morning offering and continue to be aware of my adoption as I can. I do not do these resolutions as ends in themselves, but rather, as tools to place myself in the presence of Christ with constancy and consistency.

MY PROFESSED PROMISES TO CHRIST AS A LAY CISTERCIAN

I, Michael Francis Conrad, a member of the Lay Cistercians of Our Lady of the Holy Spirit, a community of Catholics living in the world, promise to strive for a daily conversion of life as my response to the love of God.

I commit myself to live in a spirit of contemplative prayer and sacrifice in obedience to God’s universal call to holiness, using daily Cistercian practices and charisms of simplicity, humility, obedience to God’s will, hospitality, and striving for conversion of life to move from self to God.

I thank my wife, Young, and my daughter, Martha, for standing with me on my journey. I ask for prayers from the Monastic community of the Monastery of the Holy Spirit and the Lay Cistercian community, including the  Ecumenical and Auxiliary communities. I place myself in the hands of those already stand before the throne of the Lamb, including Holy Mary, Mother of God, St. Benedict, St. Bernard, the Seven Cistercian Martyrs of Our Lady of Atlas, Father Anthony Delisi and other deceased monks and Lay Cistercians of the Monastery of the Holy Spirit, and also Deacon Marcus Hepburn and George Unglaub. Finally, I accept the Rule of St. Benedict as interpreted by the constitutions and statutes of the Strict Observance Cistercians as my guide for living the Gospel within the remaining time. Ut in Omnia Dei glorificatur.