As I begin to write this article, I find myself remembering my walk around town this morning. It is Friday 31st of October – Halloween. After Mass this morning, we had a brief discussion on whether or not Halloween was a pagan celebration. I pointed out that the name was a corruption of ‘All Saints Eve’, so was at least nominally Christian. I have to admit that there was no evidence to be seen on my morning travels around town of any awareness of this link. I saw gardens with skeleton shapes, pretend grave stones, plastic ghosts, spiders and generally scary shapes. In the local Co-op store, the staff wore appropriate fancy costumes and various seasonal decorations adorned the aisles. Parents are vying with each other to provide their children with ever more elaborate costumes and householders have stocked up on suitable items to give to ‘trick-or-treat’ visitors. Even a local primary school has organised a Halloween disco. No sooner will we have recovered from this event than we will be preparing for similar activities to celebrate Christmas, again with most participants being quite unaware of the underlying meaning of the word ‘Christmas’. Has the Western world gone completely mad?
In an effort to stave off madness, I turned to the Rule to find that the reading for 31st October is about what punishment is appropriate for lighter faults. This can be summarised as being excluded from communal activities. We are social beings and even enclosed monks need some companionship during the day. So perhaps the above activities are simply part of our need to get together and share a common purpose.
By the time that you read this, we will be into December and Christmas will be dominating the minds of parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles – not to mention the children and their letters to Santa. How many of them will include a crib in their house decorations and ‘attending Mass on Christmas Day’ on their ‘to do’ list? Does the Rule have anything comforting to say about this Christmas-time madness? Well, one of the surprising things about the Rule is that it does not mention Christmas at all! However the Rule never fails as a source of good advice on how to regulate our lives. The Church designates the four weeks before Christmas Day as Advent – a preparation time for the great feast. For most of those brought up in the Catholic faith, these four weeks are to be treated as a mini-Lent, with the same practices of increasing our prayer life and decreasing our consumption of worldly goods. So we can turn to the Rule’s guidance on the observance of Lent to help us to find a balance between the spiritual and secular celebration of Christmas. Chapter 49 ‘On the Observance of Lent’ tells us to keep our lives pure and ‘wash away during these holy days all the negligences of other times’. Specifically, the monk is to increase his spiritual reading and prayers while decreasing ‘food, drink, sleep, talking and jesting’.
Despite not mentioning Christmas, the readings for December are rich in advice for both monks and oblates. The first reading, while addressed to monks working far from the monastery, applies equally to oblates – we cannot get to the oratory to say the Office, so we should say it as well as we can wherever we are. We have a duty of hospitality to travellers, especially the poor. The Rule lays great stress on the dangers of the monk having personal possessions. The oblate will inevitably have many personal things, from clothing, books, money, furniture etc. However The Rule does not expect the monk to be the poorest of the poor but to be content with what is available – the oblate can do this also.
The reading for December 26th is one that I personally have had to ponder on. It has caused me to take on various tasks that, if I had not been an oblate, I might well have refused. My life has been so much richer as a result!
Jane Coll
Oblate of Pluscarden
