By Robert Rhodes
Mennonite Weekly Review

God, come to my assistance. Lord, make haste to help me.

With these words, the nightly office of compline — the last of the Benedictine monastery’s daily liturgical gatherings — goes into quiet motion.

Only a handful of the abbey’s 145 resident monks attend this bedtime office. The black wooden choir stalls — arrayed in heavy, ascending arcs behind the altar — are better occupied at morning, midday and evening services, and at a daily mass that attracts both community members and visitors to the abbey and St. John’s University.

While the other offices — comprising the traditional Liturgy of the Hours performed in monastic communities all over the world — are longer and more musical, compline at St. John’s is nearly silent.

The 15-minute service of psalms and responses — short enough for some to recite by heart — is an intimate goodnight shared by only a few.

Praying the psalms

Weldon Nisly, pastor of Seattle (Wash.) Mennonite Church. Nisly also is a Benedictine oblate affiliated with St. John's Abbey.

Since 2002, the longtime peace activist and pastor of Seattle (Wash.) Mennonite Church has been a Benedictine oblate affiliated with St. John’s.

Along with about 50 other participants, he attended the third annual gathering of Bridgefolk, a Mennonite-Catholic ecumenical group that met at St. John’s July 29-Aug. 1.

Oblates are non-resident lay members of the monastic community who make regular retreats and keep a daily rule of prayer — usually one or more of the seven daily offices.

They also devote themselves to the spirit, if not the letter, of the age-old Rule of St. Benedict, a discourse on monastic life that has guided Benedictines for more than a millennium.

“The psalms embody and give voice to every emotion in life,” Nisly said. “I can’t imagine not including the psalms in daily prayer.”

Nisly is one of five Mennonites who are Benedictine oblates, most of them affiliated with St. John’s.

Attracted by the Benedictine tradition of combining ora et labora, or prayer and work, Nisly also embraces the Benedictine call to contemplative prayer and incorporates it in his dual vocations as activist and pastor.

“The heart of what I am is a contemplative,” said Nisly, who served in Iraq in 2003 with Christian Peacemaker Teams. “It’s shifted my sense of who I am.”

The shift began in the late 1970s, when Nisly discovered monasticism at St. Anselm’s Abbey in Washington, D.C.

His work as an activist was weighing heavily, and the devotion to prayer at St. Anselm’s seemed alive and rejuvenating.

“Over the years, I realized, it just grew on me: there’s something here,” Nisly said.

A sabbatical at St. John’s in early 2001, during which he participated in the daily offices in the abbey church, drew Nisly closer to a specific community and to what he wanted as a person devoted to prayer.

Taking Benedictine vows, he said, “means you will take a life of prayer and work rooted in Benedictine spirituality seriously, in whatever station of life you find yourself.”

After his sabbatical ended, Nisly returned to St. John’s to pledge himself to the life of an oblate, promising to bring a contemplative dimension to his daily encounters back in Seattle — or for that matter, to the shock and awe of Iraq under siege.

Ancient worship

For your name’s sake, Lord, save my life; in your justice save my soul from distress.

The psalms are at the heart of all the daily offices, harkening back to the ancient worship found in the Jewish Temple — a form of reverence many believe Christ himself observed.

During compline on this cool summer night, four monks and a lay guest of the monastery stand in a crescent behind the church’s austere altar.

Two pale candles glow on tall stands and a faint spotlight encircles the group. There is just enough illumination to read the selections from the psalter and a few other prayers.

I will bless the Lord who gives me counsel, who even at night directs my heart.

Night seems to settle even more deeply around the small group reciting these nocturnal, reflective prayers. It is strangely comforting.

Then comes a brief reading, from Ephesians 4. It is a warning and a caution, especially for those who live in community like the monks of St. John’s. It serves as a final, fraternal admonition for the day.

If you are angry, let it be without sin. The sun must not go down on your wrath; do not give the devil a chance to work on you.

In other words, no unfinished business. Go to your brother and make things right. After all, tonight could be the night your soul is required of you.

Pray then:

May the all-powerful Lord grant us a restful night and a peaceful death.

A call to solitude

Robert “Biff” Weidman is another Mennonite who has felt the call to contemplative prayer, and who has embraced what he calls his “monkishness” as a part of life.

Pastor of Fellowship of Hope Mennonite Church in Elkhart, Ind., Weidman is an oblate with St. Gregory’s Abbey, a Benedictine community in Three Rivers, Mich.

Inspired by monastics such as Charles de Foucauld — a French priest and hermit martyred among the Muslim Tuaregs of Algeria — Weidman’s journey to the contemplative life began in 1987 when he read Marsha Sinetar’s book, Ordinary People as Monks and Mystics.

“I intuitively realized a call to solitude . . . but I had no language with which to speak about that call,” Weidman told Bridgefolk participants July 30.

Not long after reading Sinetar’s book, Weidman made what he calls a monastic pilgrimage, which ultimately took him to St. Gregory’s. There, he was introduced to the choral recitation of the daily offices and to the ora et labora of Benedictine life.

“This was to be one of the most profoundly cross-cultural experiences I’ve ever had,” Weidman said.

A later period spent at The Hermitage, a Mennonite retreat center near St. Gregory’s, also left an impression.

“I was smitten by the silence,” Weidman said. “It spoke very deeply to my monkishness.”

Because he is single, Weidman also can embody other aspects of monastic life, such as celibacy and solitude, which he must balance with his pastoral roles as spiritual leader and counselor.

Meanwhile, he admits it can be a challenge to maintain a contemplative dimension in such an active life.

“I experienced monastic life as profoundly countercultural,” Weidman said.

But this sense of standing apart from the daily grind can bring its own risks — including a desire to hover above the more pedestrian lives of others: A desire to appear holy.

Needless to say, this is not the way of Benedict, or of Christ.

“The desire for success dies hard,” Weidman said. “Who among us wants to be marginal?”