THE ABBEY BANNER - St. John's Abbey

The Need to Read
by Daniel Durken, OSB
The start of another school
year always excites me
even though at my age the
academic adage has changed to
“reading, writing and arthritis.”
But I was hardly excited to come
across some sad statistics on the
state of reading in the United States:
• Annually $78 billion are spent on alcohol, $37 billion
on cigarettes, $6 billion on pet food and $1.7 billion
on textbooks.
• 58% of the adult population never read another book
after high school.
• 42% of college graduates never read another book.
• 80% of families did not buy or read a book last year.
• 57% of new books are not read to completion.
When Saint Benedict writes about “The Daily Manual
Labor” in his Rule, he seems more concerned to provide
time for reading than for working. He uses work-words
such as labor, duties and harvesting eleven times and reading-words
such as read, books and study fourteen times.
Monks were to read two to three hours daily.
He also has one or two senior monks do some monitoring
while the brothers are reading to see that no one is
wasting time or engaging in idle talk to the neglect of his
reading. He does not order that kind of supervision of the
brothers’ work.
I encourage you to order a contemporary guide to good
books—the Fall 2007 Catalog of Liturgical Press. For your
free copy call 1-800-858-5450 right now or order a copy
online at sales@litpress.org. If you can’t find a readable
and appealing book in the eighty-two pages of this catalog,
I will send you a free copy of Waiting in Joyful Hope,
Daily Reflections for Advent and Christmas 2007-2008 by
Jay Cormier.
Congratulations to David Paul Lange, OSB, whose
article “The Christ Figure” in the spring 2006 issue
of The Abbey Banner won the first place 2007
Catholic Press Association award in the Best Essay category
for religious order magazines. The judges’ critique said,
“Using crisp, clean writing, Lange takes the reader right
along into his process of giving the Lord a body and ends
with an image not soon forgotten by readers.” +
He must increase,
I must decrease
by Abbot John Klassen, OSB
FROM EDITOR AND ABBOT
We are blessed at Saint
John’s with powerful
religious symbols.
The Breuer church is surely one
of them with its powerful focus
on the altar. Another is Christ in glory in the Great Hall.
Finally, in the baptistery of the church we have the artistic
presentation of John the Baptist by Doris Cesar.
In this bronze sculpture John is tall and thin. Many
people in this country wish they could be so. This is where
a faithful diet of locusts and wild honey takes you—protein
and carbohydrates. No fats and no pasta. I wonder
what John the Baptist’s metabolism would do with a Big
Mac and a large order of French fries.
For the prophet John this commitment to simplicity is
part of being ready to hear the word of God and proclaim
it. It is not an idiosyncratic gesture, a manifestation of his
large ego. It is the kind of discipline it takes to be a good
athlete, or a dancer, or any other work that requires exquisite
focus. John’s asceticism has everything to do with
hearing and seeing God clearly in any situation. This can
only occur because he is not invested in his own comfort,
or in the way things are.
I don’t want to romanticize John the Baptist. We know
he was martyred by King Herod because he refused to be
silent. In our day we need men and women who live by
strong principles, who are willing to risk for the sake of
Christ, and for the sake of the poor and disenfranchised.
John reminds us that it takes personal and communal
discipline to live for Christ and for the gospel. For the
sake of concreteness, let me name some of them: personal
prayer, fasting, silence, reflective reading of scripture,
reading good theology and serious literature.
We want to say with John the Baptist, “He must increase,
I/we must decrease.” There is a wondrous, joyful
outcome to being like John the Baptist. We see firsthand
Christ at work in our world. This is a source of joy and
hope. +
The Abbey Banner Fall 2007 page 3