Tonight's benefit concert featured my friend Cyprian Consiglio, whose music and faith shine like a thousand stars in a dark night. His community--the monks of New Camaldoli at Big Sur--has been shaken this winter by torrential rains, rains that have destroyed access roads and closed the monks' retreat center for at least four, maybe five or six months. We were honored, at Peace, to host the benefit and offer our love and support.
If you wish, you can find more about the Hermitage's fundraising efforts--as they try to rebuild and reopen--by visiting their GO FUND ME PAGE HERE. (Then wait a few months, and make plans to visit them on Big Sur for a retreat!)
Among many songs--most of them his own--Cyprian pulled out this one: "Unless a Grain of Wheat Falls." The lyric captures Jesus' own teaching in John 12:24: "Very truly, I tell you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it yields a good harvest."
Cyprian spoke of the mystery, really the mystery of Easter, hidden in these strange and simple words. It is our calling, as people of faith, to fall into the earth and die...or to disappear into the loaf as leaven...or to flavor the whole meal like salt. What an odd and particular practice this is...to hide ourselves in the world's simple suffering...to hide our ministries in ordinary communities and neighborhoods...to live in disappearing...to rise up by falling like grains in the field. I give thanks for the sisters, brothers, friends whose lives remind me of this mystery, and embody this mystery, every day!
