The Celtic saints of earlier centuries made much of the idea of peregrinatio, a difficult-to-translate word that suggests an open-ended journey. It was not uncommon for medieval Irish monks to set out with no destination; they left with only the simple impulse to go and seek... the idea was to learn to live as travelers, pilgrims, "guests of the world," as sixth-century Irishman Saint Columbanus put it. There was to be a creative openness, even if that meant living in a kind of exile so as not to hold too tightly to one's ambitions and spiritual itinerary. The idea was to leave behind the known and safe to find a truer basis for security.
Timothy Jones: A Place for God, 46-47
From the book, Dakota.
Some of my very favorite bits from Dakota, by Kathleen Norris. The last part never fails to make me laugh:
Is It You, Again?
True hospitality is marked by an open response to the dignity of each and every person. Henri Nouwen has described it as receiving the stranger on his terms, and asserts that it can be offered only by those who “have found the center of their lives in their own hearts.” Monastic life seeks to provide the silence and stillness that leads to such awareness for the individual monk and then allows him to offer it, through hospitality, to others who seek it.
For the monk, even repentance is seen in terms of hospitality. For one modern Benedictine, repentance means “not primarily…a sense of regret,” but “a renunciation of narrow and sectarian human views that are not large enough for God’s mystery.” It means recognizing that we have not always seen grace where it exists in the world, and agreeing “to turn away from a stubborn and obdurate position that cannot accept what is new and different and therefore cannot entertain God’s mysterious ways.” The word “entertain” is used advisedly here, as the monk goes on to speak of hospitality: “The classic sign of [our] acceptance of God’s mystery is welcoming and making room” for the stranger, the other, the surprising, the unlooked for and unwanted. It means learning to read the world better, that we may better know our place in it.
Page 197-198
