Odilo's souls
November 4, 2021
In the midst of a busy week, Tuesday felt eerily quiet on campus as we set aside time for voting (congratulations to our very own Emily Franzen of Norwood!).
In the quiet moments after casting my own ballot, my thoughts drifted to Odilo.
Who’s Odilo, you ask?
Intellectually and artistically, Odilo (962-1049 CE) was no Hildegard (another great baby name overdue for a comeback). Frankly, it’s hard to identify even a single personal characteristic that distinguished Odilo.
Any virtues he may have had lie shrouded in the shadows of the remarkable institution he served for many decades.
So think of Odilo as something like a patron saint for administrators (and for fire-resistant fabrics).
Odilo, you see, was one of a series of long-serving abbots who helped make the monastery of Cluny into an unparalleled religious, organizational, artistic, and cultural center in early medieval Europe—one that lasted (ironically) until French revolutionaries burned it down.
Odilo and his successor together led the abbey for 115(!) years, strengthening Cluny and the entire network of Benedictine monasteries across Europe.
Odilo and his fellow Cluniacs took the distinctive monastic vow of stability: they swore never to leave their own far-off-the-beaten-path abbey.
Yet they nevertheless practiced community-engaged monasticism. At a time of famine, they melted monastery treasures to feed the poor. And they leveraged their reputation among counts, dukes, and popes to promote an anti-violence campaign, the Truce of God—a central part of Europe’s first peace movement.
Odilo is also credited with establishing November 2 as All Souls Day, which together with All Saints Day and Día de los Muertos forms a triumvirate of (theologically and culturally distinct) observances to remember the dead.
So this week, as my own remembrances turned to those we’ve lost over the past year, I couldn’t help but think of Odilo too.
Requiescant in pace.
