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By Root 727 0

do it, but I had to act, to take the plunge. I also had no idea where it would lead. An oblation is an abbreviated yet powerful profession of monastic vows; you attach yourself to a particular monastery by signing a document on the altar during Mass, in which you promise to follow the Rule of St. Benedict insofar as your situation in life will allow. A married woman such as myself, for example, who makes frequent visits to a monastery, will follow the Rule in a far different way than the men and women who commit their lives entirely to a monastic community. One thing I did not know was exactly how I had come to be here. Having moved twelve years before from New York City to my grandparents’ house in western South Dakota seemed to have something to do with it. And I’d begun to realize that the apprenticeship as a writer that I’d embarked on in my early twenties was in essence a religious quest. (For years literature had seemed an adequate substitute for religion in my life.) The fact that I’d been raised a thorough Protestant, with little knowledge of religious orders, and no sense of monasticism as a living tradition, was less an obstacle to my becoming an oblate than the many doubts about the Christian religion that had been with me since my teens. Still, although I had little sense of where I’d been, I knew that standing before the altar in a monastery chapel was a remarkable place for me to be, and making an oblation was a remarkable, if not incomprehensible, thing for me to be doing.

The word “oblate” is from the Latin for “to offer,” and Jesus himself is often referred to as an “oblation” in the literature of the early church. Many people now translate “oblate” as “associate,” and while that may seem to describe the relationship modern oblates have with monastic communities, it does not adequately convey the religious dimension of being an oblate. Substituting the word “associate” for “oblation” in reference to Jesus demonstrates this all too well; no longer an offering, Jesus becomes a junior partner in a law firm. The ancient word “oblate” proved instructive for me. Having no idea what it meant, I appreciated its rich history when I first looked it up in the dictionary. But I also felt it presumptuous to claim to be an “offering” and was extremely reluctant to apply to myself a word that had so often been applied to Jesus Christ. The monk who was my oblate director, guiding my studies of the Rule (a period that was supposed to last a year but rambled on for nearly three), waited patiently for me to sort out my muddle. Finally I said to him, “I can’t imagine why God would want me, of all people, as an offering. But if God is foolish enough to take me as I am, I guess I’d better do it.” The monk smiled broadly and said, “You’re ready.”

Once I became an oblate, I found that I’d gained an enormous family. Benedictines are everywhere, and like a good family, they keep interfering in what I like to pretend is my own life. A chance encounter at an American Benedictine Academy convention led to my applying to the Institute for Ecumenical and Cultural Research at St. John’s Abbey and University in Collegeville, Minnesota, and then spending not one, but two nine-month terms there. I had often heard Benedictines refer to their Liturgy of the Hours (also called the Divine Office) as “the sanctification of time,” but had not much idea of what this could mean until I’d attended the liturgies at St. John’s on a daily basis for many months.

Gradually my perspective on time had changed. In our culture, time can seem like an enemy: it chews us up and spits us out with appalling ease. But the monastic perspective welcomes time as a gift from God, and seeks to put it to good use rather than allowing us to be used up by it. A friend who was educated by the Benedictines has told me that she owes to them her sanity with regard to time. “You never really finish anything in life,” she says, “and while that’s humbling, and frustrating, it’s all right. The Benedictines, more than any other people I know, insist that there is time in each