Walking in Valleys of Darkness Read online

  Text and illustrations copyright © 2011 by Albert Holtz, O.S.B.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the written permission of the publisher.

  Unless otherwise noted, the Scripture quotations contained herein are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright © 1989 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of Churches of Christ in the U.S.A. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

  Quotations from the Rule of Benedict so designated are from RB1980: The Rule of Benedict in English (Collegeville, Minn.: The Liturgical Press, 1981).

  Morehouse Publishing, 4775 Linglestown Road, Harrisburg, PA 17112

  Morehouse Publishing, 445 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10016

  Morehouse Publishing is an imprint of Church Publishing Incorporated. www.churchpublishing.org

  Cover design by Laurie Klein Westhafer

  Typeset by Carol Sawyer

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Holtz, Albert.

  Walking in valleys of darkness : a benedictine journey through troubled times / Albert Holtz ; illustrations by the author.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references.

  ISBN 978-0-8192-2739-3 (pbk.)—ISBN 978-0-8192-2741-6 (ebook) 1. Benedictines-Spiritual life. 2. Spirituality—Catholic Church. 3. Consolation. I. Title.

  BX3003.H58 2011

  248.8’46—dc22

  2010044758

  To Bob Holtz

  CONTENTS

  INTRODUCTION

  CHAPTER ONE

  MY WORLD FALLS APART: THE CLOSING OF SAINT BENEDICT’S PREP

  1. A Frightening Newness

  2. Finding Courage

  3. Losing Your Nerve

  4. Being a Paraclete

  CHAPTER TWO

  LEARNING TO LET GO: KNEE SURGERY

  5. Weaving the Web of Love

  6. Leaning on the Lord

  7. Seeking God

  8. A Work in Progress

  CHAPTER THREE

  GETTING HOLLOWED OUT: THE DEATH OF MY BROTHER BOB

  9. Reading with the Eyes of Faith

  10. The Healing Visit

  11. The God of Compassion

  12. Expanding My Heart

  CHAPTER FOUR

  My Turn with the Monster: Cancer

  13. Calling for Help

  14. Lying Down in Green Pastures

  15. You of Little Faith

  16. A New Sense of Time

  CHAPTER FIVE

  WELCOMING MYSTERY: OUR COMMUNITY GROWS SMALLER

  17. The Other Side of God

  18. Learning How to Worry

  19. Getting Passionate

  20. Opening Up

  CHAPTER SIX

  THE KEY TO TROUBLED TIMES: THE PASCHAL MYSTERY

  21. Witnessing to the Risen Lord: Father Maurus

  22. Surprised by Joy

  23. Lifted Up with Christ

  24. Rising to New Life

  EPILOGUE

  ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY

  SUBJECT INDEX

  INDEX OF GREEK WORDS

  INTRODUCTION

  One of the most basic of all human traits is the desire to make sense of things. We all want to know that our life has a meaning—that it has a plot. Our Judeo-Christian tradition reflects this need when it interprets all of human experience in terms of one single overarching story: God’s deep and eternal love for creation, and especially for humankind. Thus the history of the world, the history of the Israelite people, the history of the church, and our own individual lives are all part of the larger story of God’s loving plan for us. Our faith assures us that even our worst and most painful experiences are mysteries that actually make sense in terms of God’s vast, infinitely loving, plan for us—in particular the central mystery of Christ’s suffering, death, and resurrection.

  We Benedictines1 are particularly aware of living within the framework of this sacred story because our lives are immersed in Scripture. Our common public prayer is made up almost entirely of psalms; our private prayer and meditative reading are grounded in Scripture. Saint Benedict’s Rule offers a quotation from the Bible as the basis for every one of its practices. Having lived in this Scripture-saturated setting for almost fifty years now, I automatically tend to see things against the backdrop of that great overarching story that is revealed in the Bible.

  Some months after the beginning of the economic downturn in 2008, I had to prepare a day of reflection on the topic “A Spirituality for Troubled Times.” I found myself naturally interpreting our “troubled times” in terms of the Bible and its story of God’s unending love—a story that is always working itself out in our lives, sometimes in ways that we cannot comprehend. I also decided that the idea of “troubled times” could hardly be limited to people’s financial hardships, but needed to be expanded to include all the difficulties and struggles we experience in our lives, from the most trivial to the most tragic, from my locking the keys in the car to the doctor telling me I have cancer. “Troubled times” came to refer to any occasion when one is no longer in control.

  As you would expect, writing those conferences for that day of reflection gave me an opportunity to reflect on my own periods of struggle and suffering. I’d always thought of my life as being quite pleasant and rather uneventful, and I’d certainly never considered myself someone who had experienced “troubled times.” But when I began deliberately looking for difficult periods in my life, I was surprised at how quickly I came up with several of them. The most painful was my brother’s death from cancer, which plunged me into a period of grief such as I could never have imagined. Another major catastrophe had come many years before Bob died, when our monastery’s school closed in 1972, leaving me numb with shock and sorrow and fearful of my future as a monk and a teacher.

  When I looked back on these and other experiences, I noticed a certain pattern: Very often when I had managed to remain grounded in the Lord or to get some perspective or even consolation in a situation, it was thanks to an insight I had gained from meditating on some particular New Testament word in Greek—the original language of the Christian writings.

  This is not as strange as it seems. Most of us have certain foreign words that we like to use because they convey better than any English word exactly the meaning or emotion that we want to express. For example, if we were brought up near an Italian neighborhood, the statement “You’re giving me agida!” says so much more than “You’re making me upset.” If we’re from the New York area, the Yiddish word in the statement “That took a lot of chutzpah” probably brings with it all sorts of overtones and feelings that are missing from “He had a lot of nerve.” And for most Americans the expression “He was into this macho thing” evokes a whole set of unspoken Latino cultural and emotional assumptions that can’t really be translated. Sometimes a particularly powerful word such as karma or angst becomes so meaningful to someone that it shapes the way he or she sees the world and makes decisions. This is exactly the case with me and my Greek words: In my years of studying the Scriptures as a monk and a priest I’ve come across certain words that have become part of me and have had a pervasive influence on my mind and heart. Maybe I should explain how this happened.

  As someone who loves languages (I’ve taught French, Latin, and Spanish) and who studied Greek in college, I have often turned to my Greek New Testament2 for insight while meditating on a passage or preparing a homily. Over a period of almost fifty years I have been filling the wide margins of my big Greek New Testament with a marvel
ous jumble of notes gleaned from commentaries and dictionaries: I’ve noted dozens of clever puns, words with multiple meanings, and thought-provoking Greek roots. And since I usually try to make my reading of Scripture personal, I have sometimes scrawled next to some particularly powerful word a pointed note to myself such as “Why am I so afraid to try this in my own life?” This is how dozens of Greek New Testament words that I have read and studied over and over have become like old familiar friends, offering me wise insights and timely suggestions that have helped me through some very troubled times.

  In the course of the twenty-four reflections that follow I introduce you to many of these “friends” of mine and share with you some of what they’ve taught me. You’ll notice that many of the insights and ideas that I’ve gleaned from these Greek words simply cannot come through in translation and are destined to lie hidden like buried treasures. The book thus has the added benefit of making these insights available to everyone.

  The book is divided into six chapters, the first five of which, arranged in chronological order, correspond to five painful periods in my life. Chapter one tells of the closing of Saint Benedict’s Prep in 1972 when I was not yet thirty, an event which left me numb with shock and sorrow. Chapter two deals with an experience several years after that, when I tore a ligament in my knee and underwent serious, painful surgery that left me hobbling around on crutches for eleven long weeks. Then, in chapter three, my brother’s death from cancer plunged me into a period of grief such as I could never have imagined, and more recently, as recounted in chapter four, I underwent cancer surgery myself. Chapter five considers the present moment in Newark Abbey’s history, as I and my brothers deal with diminishing numbers and wonder what the future will bring. The sixth and final chapter does not address any specific struggle of mine but rather suggests how the Paschal mystery of Christ’s redemptive suffering, death, and resurrection offers a life-giving and optimistic perspective that can help us throughout our lives, and especially during troubled times.

  It is my fond hope that as you walk with me through some of the dark valleys of my life, you may find a few insights or some encouragement as you deal with your own troubled times. May you come to see more clearly every day that all the events of your life are part of the mysterious story of God’s constant, caring, and unconditional love for you, for each one of us, and indeed for all of creation.

  1. Saint Benedict of Nursia (480–540) wrote a “Rule for Monasteries” which still shapes the hearts, minds, and basic spiritual outlook of Benedictine men and women today.

  2. The entire New Testament was written originally in Greek. When a New Testament author quotes the Old Testament, in most cases the citation is from the Greek translation of the OT from the original Hebrew done in the 3rd century B.C., known as the Septuagint.

  CHAPTER ONE

  MY WORLD FALLS APART

  The Closing of Saint Benedict’s Prep

  The first Benedictine monks I ever met were my teachers at St. Benedict’s Prep in Newark. By the end of my freshman year I had already decided that I wanted to become a monk like Father Eugene and Father Benedict and live in that monastery and teach in those classrooms. I did indeed become a Benedictine at nineteen, and after being ordained a priest I did begin teaching at St. Benedict’s in 1969. Unfortunately, not long after my arrival, rumors started circulating that our school was in such serious financial difficulties that it might not survive. It was a typical scenario for Catholic institutions in inner-city areas during the early 1970s: a combination of the lack of new monks to replace the ones who were dying or leaving, declining enrollment due to a general disaffection with Catholic education, and “white flight” from the city into the suburbs where new archdiocesan regional high schools were being built. Eventually these factors and others culminated in St. Benedict’s closing in the spring of 1972, less than three years after I had started teaching there. I was only twenty-nine and my life had been turned upside down. This was the most devastating event I had ever experienced and it left me dazed and disheartened.

  The four reflections that follow, written so many years later, include insights that came to me as I was going through the experience and others that are the fruit of long reflection. But all of them attest to the fact that moments of trial can also be occasions of grace and growth.

  1. A Frightening Newness

  I LAY THERE IN MY DARK ROOM in the monastery after midnight trying in vain to fall asleep. I just stared at the ceiling as the glow from the streetlights seeped in around the edges of the shades to paint eerie shadows on the ceiling. I’d been lying like this for a couple of hours, too troubled and anxious to sleep. That evening at a meeting of the monastic community, my whole world had suddenly been changed forever: It had been decided that our school would close in June, four months from now.

  For almost three years I had been living out my plan, my dream of teaching here at Saint Benedict’s Prep, and had assumed that I would continue to do so for the rest of my life. And now that dream was ended, and the future had become a complete blank. From this night onward my future would not be what I’d hoped and planned. I had no idea what was going to happen in my life, except for one thing: It was going to be something completely new.

  I had always loved new things, such as putting on a new shirt or starting a new school term with a classroom full of new faces. And the Lord, too, seems to have a fondness for new and unfamiliar situations, starting with the act of creation itself, and then the call of Abraham, calling the Israelites down into Egypt and then out into the wilderness and finally into the promised land. Through the entire New Testament as well the Lord is always up to something new. Saint Paul’s repeated call to become a “new being” used to sound like a great idea. The lines “see, everything has become new” (2 Corinthians 5:17) and “[you have] clothed yourselves with the new self” (Colossians 3:10) used to delight me. Until that night. Suddenly I was face to face with an unsettling and even terrifying side of what it means to be “new.” I just kept staring at the shadows on the ceiling and trying to make sense of the confused patterns.

  Although I didn’t know it that night as I lay there haunted by fears and anxieties, I was actually in good company: I was experiencing what our fathers and mothers in the faith had experienced many times in the days of the early church. They had noticed that while newness could sometimes be a source of pleasure, at other times it could be the cause of real suffering. In fact they left us in the New Testament some good insights on newness, including two very different words for new.

  One Greek word for new, neos,1 means new in the sense of “recent, young.” It’s a pleasant enough word used for such things as the “new wine” that gets poured into old wineskins (Luke 5:37). This kind of new describes a new version of something else, as when Jesus is called “the mediator of a new [neos] covenant” (Hebrews 12:24). Everything would be great if “new” were limited to this kind of newness. But unfortunately the New Testament idea is complicated by a second word for new, which describes a very different kind of newness.

  The other word is kainos,2 new in the sense of something entirely unheard of and unknown, previously un-thought-of, and entirely different from anything that went before. It describes, for instance, the “new self” we need to put on: “put away the old self of your former way of life . . . and put on the new [kainos] self, created in God’s way in righteousness and holiness of truth” (Ephesians 4:24). This new self is not some cosmetic “makeover” in which we remain essentially unchanged inside (that would be simply neos), rather we are being called to be entirely new persons, not neos but kainos.

  Unfortunately it is precisely this unsettling, radical kind of newness that shows up in the most crucial passages of the New Testament, and it was exactly this kind of newness that was keeping me awake that night.

  Kainos describes the “new creation” that every Christian already is; “So whoever is in Christ is a new [kainos] creation: the old things have passed away; behold new [
kainos] things have come” (2 Corinthians 5:17). Once again it is clear that God is not interested in freshening us up a bit by simply renovating our old, familiar ways.

  Since we cannot be entirely new (kainos) while at the same time holding onto our former ways of behaving, one of the key requirements for following Christ and entering the kingdom is openness to being thoroughly transformed.

  As I found out that terrible night, the message that “All the old, familiar things have passed away” is frightening and painful; but, as I have continued to discover over and over, being neos, “new and improved,” is simply not good enough; it is not what we are called to be as Christians. We can draw some comfort however from a vivid vision in the Book of Revelation, written for Christians who were enduring terrible persecution: “the holy city, a new [kainos] Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God” (Revelation 21:2). The message is clear that even in the midst of appalling suffering—perhaps especially in the midst of such suffering—the transformation of our own world is already under way, just as it was on Calvary. But while we’re in the midst of a shattering ordeal, it’s nearly impossible to appreciate this newness at work.

  I lay there sleepless with worry, still having no idea what God was about to do—except that it would be something new, and not the pleasant kind of new either; it would be something entirely different from anything that had been before—kainos.

  Small wonder that I never did fall asleep that night.

  For Reflection

  1. Has God ever called you to a new situation that was not just neos (an updated version of some previous situation) but rather kainos (previously un-thought-of)? If so, what did it feel like? How did you respond? Did it change your relationship with God?

  2. Reflect for a few minutes on these words of St. Paul: “So whoever is in Christ is a new [kainos] creation: the old things have passed away; behold new [kainos] things have come” (2 Cor 5:17). Has the Lord been asking you recently to let go of something “old” and familiar in order to make you into a new creation? If so, have you been resisting the change? Welcoming it? Accepting it grudgingly?