Last week I had to attend a meeting at a most unique site. I had been there many years ago as a tourist; now it served as a venue for a group of pastors to get together. Tucked away in what used to be Florida scrub and what is now a “Condo Canyon” is what they aptly call the Ancient Spanish Monastery.

Back in the 1950’s a remarkably wealthy and powerful man, who posthumously became famous because of his granddaughter’s kidnapping in 1974, bought a monastery in Spain. Only a fabulously wealthy person would think of dismantling, one stone block at a time, a cattle barn that had been at one time a Benedictine monastery.

And that’s what William Randolph Hearst did. But promptly after that, he had money troubles and never did anything about it. It sat in a million hay-filled crates (11,000 to be exact–I can’t imagine what that looked like) in Brooklyn for decades, until 1964, when two guys bought it and shipped it to North Maimi where it sits today.

Oh, the squirrels you could chase in this story!  Spanish history of the 12^th Century. The oligarchical nature of the Hearst family. Patty Hearst and the Symbionese Liberation Army. Twentieth century tourism in Florida. The Episcopal Church (which now owns it.) 

But for me? The last time I went there was probably 35 years ago. Janice and I were DINK’s. (Do you remember that acronym- Dual Income, No Kids.)  We went as tourists and learned the history of the place. This time, as an empty nester (is that the stage I am in now???), I experienced this site, meant to be situated on a hillside in rural Spain, as a little oasis in a sea of high-rise condos. Like Central Park in New York City, it now offers a little bit of green in a concrete jungle of 50 shades of gray.

I think that’s what the church is like nowadays. In a culture of “50 shades of gray” the church offers a green space, a place of respite and of moral dis-ambiguity, a place of peace amidst the chaos of traffic and commerce, a place of focused contemplation instead of bombastic entertainment.

“Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest,” said Jesus two thousand years ago. Those who heard Him then had never heard a car horn, or seen a questionable movie, or sat in a cubicle with two monitors, a headset, glancing at text from a client while trying to eat lunch. The rest Jesus spoke of is found in an aspirational calling to focus on the important, not the immediate; to focus on the transcendent, not the entropy of the manufactured; to focus on the spiritual, not the economy, to focus on God, instead of self.

My prayer is that you find that rest here today.

Back from the monastery,

Craig

“Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.”  Matthew 11:28-30 (NIV)