In Case You’re Looking, God Lives Here

February 9th, 2007 at 07:07am Post Staff 3

OLD SNOWMASS, COLORADO–I’ve been to heaven. You should have seen it.

On the final day of a three-day Aspen Institute Symposium on Forgiveness or Revenge we all went out to Old Snowmass to see how the other half lives—the fathers and brothers who live with God on a daily basis. Father William Meninger, an expert on forgiveness and all matters of living, was our guide, but we also met Brother John, Brother Todd, and Father Joseph, the abbot or bossman of the monastery.

My entrance to heaven was not smooth: my car got stuck in the snow, and it took Brother Charles, in plainclothes and with a four-wheel drive rig, to yank me out as the members of the class tried to make me feel better as they drove by.

But there is karma at work on the 300 acres of the old monastery in Snowmass—there has to be. Horses eat hay in the fields of the Lord, and the Benedictines, who go back to single-digit centuries, are required to work with their hands. You’ve got to love an order that makes chocolate chip cookies its reason for living, and the oatmeal and orange somethings were next to godliness, too.

Father William, in the heavy armor of his cassock, showed us around. Sure, the place was quiet, but there was no vow of silence here—everyone who had a tongue wagged it. The monks own nothing of their own, not even the shirts on their back or the slippers on their feet, but the do have an enormous library and donated computers and the command that they pray like the devil for all of God’s children and you and me. It’s a great job if you can stand the company, and the monks spend all kinds of time every week making sure monk-to-monk communication has no glitches here on earth. They even bring in a communications consultant—a nun, no less—for four days a year to make sure everyone who walks the walk is talking the talk.

Before vespers, we ended with a compassion meditation Father William stole from the Dalai Llama, whereby you focus on a person you love, then you bring that love (with permission) to a person you don’t know, and then you take all of that love and bring it to someone you don’t like at all.

For Father William and the monks of Saint Benedictine—there are but 15 on the 300 acres in Old Snowmass—that kind of love is all in a day’s work. For the rest of us mortals it was a brief window onto heaven, where they have some of the best cookies in the world.

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