Routine and Interruption

Here comes Monday. Here comes life under the form of routine. Here comes Life in its interruptions.

Today we have morning instruction but no afternoon ministry. Tomorrow we have afternoon ministry but no morning instruction. On Wednesday, we celebrate Eucharist not in the morning but in the evening, because in the morning we will visit Catholic high school juniors to tell them about our way of life. Thursday and Friday we will do everything, work and prayer, as intended, but nothing as scheduled, because we will be visiting the Capuchin friars who live in Vermont.

No two days are alike. Thanks be to God.

After an uncommon weekend in Boston, the postulants and friars have returned to Brooklyn and are returning to their routine of work and prayer, the better to interrupt the routine. Or, we could say that the brothers are drawn back to their routine of work and prayer so that the routine may be interrupted, gracefully.

Therein lies the Gift, and the inspiration for the little gift of our lives. For our gift is not the works themselves. Our gift is not the prayers themselves.

The routine is not the gift. The gift is the interruption. The interruption is Life itself.

Our gift is fraternity, holy, loving friendship with God in Christ through the Spirit, to all others. Our work, our prayer is directed wholly toward living together with people everywhere in the God who is everywhere. Living together is the deepest, most ultimate interruption.

What we offer in the fraternity whose heart is Christ is nothing less than the breaking of sameness, singleness, and apartness -- the breaking of distance, in time and space and being.

All our striving in religious life is a preparation for interruption.

Here comes Monday. Let us prepare, once again, to be disturbed out of the depths into delight. While the world waits for change; while the powerful and the impatient claim in their foolishness the fire of change but only burn themselves; while those who strive for might build, build, and rebuild, let us be still, and yet work and pray in expectation of something greater than change, something beyond change. Let routine be transformed into interruption. May our life be transubstantiated into Life.