Community in Christ

Adapted from The Rule of Benedict: Insights for the Ages

by Sr. Joan Chittister, Chapter 72.

St. Benedict seeks to reveal to us a spirituality that is about caring for the people we live with, loving the people we don't and loving God more than ourselves. 

Through reading, study, and theological reflections we will learn to listen for the voice of God everywhere in life, especially in one another and here--together. An ancient tale from another tradition tells that a disciple asked the Holy One:

"Where shall I look for Enlightenment?"

"Here," the Holy One said.

"When will it happen?"

"It is happening right now," the Holy One said.

"Then why don't I experience it?"

"Because you do not look," the Holy said.

"What should I look for?"

"Nothing," the Holy One said. "Just look."

"At what?"

"Anything your eyes alight upon," the Holy One said.

"Must I look in a special kind of way?"

"No," the Holy One said. "The ordinary way will do."

"But don't I always look in the ordinary way?"

"No," the Holy One said. "You don't."

"Why ever not?" the disciple demanded.

"Because to look you must be here," the Holy One said. 

"You're mostly somewhere else."

We are called to listen to and to look at what God is saying to us in our simple, sometimes insane and always uncertain daily lives. Simple religiosity sometimes seeks to make a god out of religious devotion itself, walking over the poor on the way to the altar. Known to Benedict as bitter zeal, it all too frequently renders the useless invisible and makes devotion more sacred than community. 

Bitter zeal wraps us up in ourselves and makes us feel holy about it. Bitter zeal renders us blind to others, deaf to those around us, struck dumb in the face of the demands of dailiness.

Good zeal, reveals to us the holiness of the human community, immerses us in Christ and surrenders us to God, minute by minute, person by person, day after day after day. Good zeal provides the foundation for the spirituality of the long haul. It keeps us going when days are dull and holiness seems to be the stuff of more glamorous lives, of martyrdom and dramatic differences. 

But it is then, just then, when Benedict of Nursia reminds us from the dark of the sixth century that sanctity is the stuff of community in Christ.