A Place of Paradox
I believe in God because I believe in Saint John’s Abbey.
If this sounds a bit sacrilegious, consider the incredible theological diversity among the many people who have affirmed with deep conviction that this academic and monastic outpost in central Minnesota, bearing the unassuming name of Collegeville, is a place where the Spirit moves. My own experience of Saint John’s resonates profoundly with such an affirmation.
As a “Catholic Mennonite,” my familiarity with the abbey began through its connections with the Mennonite-Catholic ecumenical movement known as Bridgefolk. I first visited the abbey as a pilgrim in transit at a very uncertain juncture in my life, and despite the cold winter weather I felt powerfully drawn further into the life of both the Collegeville community and the Catholic Church. To make a long story short, I ended up applying to a graduate program at the university’s School of Theology, eventually returning to Collegeville as a student and finally making the quantum leap into full communion, becoming a “Mennonite Catholic” through the sacrament of confirmation in the abbey church, the culmination of a long process that I can only describe as mysteriously providential.
From these experiences, I can say with a confidence I have about very few things that I know there is a Spirit that moves because I have seen and felt its movement here. I have seen it in the remarkable capabilities within the monastic community of holding the church’s internal dissonances in creative tension, in the living-out of the Benedictine charisms of radical hospitality and attentive listening. I have felt it in the stirrings of inspiration toward steps of faith from the barely-perceptible to the undeniably life-altering, in the agape that is nurtured among members of historically divergent traditions who share a relationship to this place.
Saint John’s is a place rich with paradox. It has long had a place both at the heart of the Catholic world and at its cutting edge. Its monastics are at the same time keepers of ancient traditions and prophetic pushers of the envelope, radically obedient mavericks, practiced acrobats walking a tightrope between the ethereal and the earthy, the old and the new – and, yes, the right and the left. In the midst of a social climate in which ecclesial polemics too often mirror the surrounding political ones, the Saint John’s community is helping the Catholic Church to keep its balance.
Julia Smucker
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