The God-life, Benedict is telling us, is a never-ending, unremitting, totally absorbing enterprise. God is intent on it; so must we be. The Hebrew poet, Moses Ibn Ezra, writes: "Those who persist in knocking will succeed in entering." Benedict thinks no less. It is not perfection that leads us to God; it is perseverance.
...if we have it, we know we are made for
greatness, we are made for God.
Sr Joan Chittister
We've now begun one of the most important chapters in the Rule of Benedict. I believe Sr Joan is correct when she says...
If the modern age has lost anything that needs to be rediscovered, if the Western world has denied anything that needs to be owned, if individuals have rejected anything that needs to be professed again, if the preservation of the globe in the twenty-first century requires anything of the past at all, it may well be the commitment of the Rule of Benedict to humility.
Humility allows us to form a proper sense of self in a universe of wonders. Humility is the basis for right relationships in life and necessary if we truly want to grow in the Spirit of God. As Sr Joan points out...
...being sinless is not enough. [We are called to be] steeped in the mind of God. [We must] become aware that the God we seek is aware of us.
God is within us to be realized...it is simply a matter of opening our eyes to the light that drives out the darkness within us.
It is a matter of gaining the God within, the love of Whom impels us to good.
Sr Joan writes...
Silence is a cornerstone of ... spiritual development but the goal of monastic silence is not non-talking. The goal ... is respect for others, a sense of place, a spirit of peace.
Benedictine spirituality forms us to listen ... for the voice of God. Benedictine spirituality forms us to know our place in the world. When we refuse to give place to others, when we consume all the space of our worlds with our own sounds and our own truths and our own wisdom and our own ideas, there is no room for anyone else's ideas.
Benedictine spirituality is a builder of human community. When talk is unrestrained, when gossip becomes the food of the soul, then the destruction of others can't be far behind. When talk is loud and boisterous, when we make light of everything, when nothing is spared the raillery of a joke, the seriousness of all of life is at stake and our spirits wither from a lack of beauty and substance.
Grow in the silence.
"Why do you need teachers?" the visitor asked a disciple.
"Because,' the disciple answered, "if water must be boiled it needs a vessel between the fire and itself."
Hold this metaphor gently in your hand...now...think about someone in your life that has always been there to guide, shelter, and shape.
There is no going through life alone. We need wisdom figures ... teachers, fine parents and mentors, tender husbands and gentle wives, good friends ... who listen to us as much as we listen to them....
I worked for a man who had the most interesting smile--it was a quiet smile--not quite Mona Lisa--but surely not what I would call a grin. Today, I realize it was indeed a quiet wize smile. Today, I believe he was watching a young man, loud, always certain and willing to talk...and he was thinking...when will he learn.
I'm more than a little embarrassed to tell you, I remember that smile from 30 years ago--and I am troubled by how little has changed. And so, Benedict and Sr Joan remind us again today,
Benedict wants moderation, balance, control...hold all of life in perspective...not to be overtaken, consumed, swept up, swallowed....
Let me close with a gift from a dear friend...
We are now in the heart of Chapter 4: Tools of Good Works. I pray I am ready. The Christian call is a simple one--but how so hard to live by. Benedict writes
"Do not repay one bad turn with another" (1 Thessalonians 5;15; 1 Peter 3:9). Do not injure anyone but bear injuries patiently. "Love your enemies" (Matthew 5:44; Luke 6:27). If people curse you, do not curse them back but bless them instead. "Endure persecution for the sake of justice" (Matthew 5:10).
We are to stay gentle even with those who are not gentle with us. The Gospels, Sr Joan reminds us, don't talk about winning; they talk about loving.
We must be prepared to bear whatever blows it takes for the sake of justice, quietly, gently, even lovingly, with never a blow in return.
What a challenge this is for most of us! And then Sr Joan raises the bar, reminding us we are called to engage in the great Christian enterprise of acting for others in the place of God--every day, in every moment. St. Teresa of Avila made this clear....
Christ has no body but mine. He prays in me, works in me, looks through my eyes, speaks through my words, works through my hands, walks with my feet, and loves with my heart.
If we can embrace this truth, .... allowing that transformative love to permeate all of our work, we will not only build the Kingdom of Heaven, but we will also find eternal rest and peace for ourselves.
Reading now from Sr Joan....
The monastic heart is not just to be a good heart. It is to be engaged in the great Christian enterprise of acting for others in the place of God.
Sr Joan Chittister
Sister Joan recently talked to us about the role of the abbot or prioress, saying...
The role of the abbot or prioress is to direct their energies to bringing the community to the white heat of the spiritual life....
I invite you to consider if this might be our role in our community--not so much by preaching, but by the way we live out our lives in our community. We are called to care for each other. You are teaching me this every day. And, we are called above all else, to persist; to never lose hope!
Benedict knows there is a spark of the divine in all of us. We are called to see it in each other and to help it grow.
There are times in our lives when we are confronted by ideas that don't seem to belong where we live. I believe, in those moments, we are called to listen even more carefully and seek the word of God in the voice of the other. For some, the following may be one of those moments. For others, it is where they live.
The Time to Embrace
What we need to develop in our time is a spirituality of embrace, the sanctification of feeling. We have been told that the greatest of these is love, but we do not really believe it. Not on the rational level. We have been told to be willing to repeatedly turn the other cheek but we do not risk it. Not on the social level. And yet, until we have the grace to regurgitate at the sight of brutality anywhere, what hope can we possibly have for the success of divinity's great experiment––the mind of God in the human heart.
Santayana writes: "The young person who has not wept is a savage and the old person who will not laugh is a fool." The spirituality of embrace depends on our willingness to put down the trappings of false intellectualism, of rationalism, of patriarchy so that both men and women alike can draw on their emotions without shame and be directed by their noblest feelings without fear.
Human community and globalism hang in the balance. The values we bring to decision making in the modern world are no longer a matter of purely private or personal importance. We cannot pretend to humanity and continue to deprive ourselves of half our way of perceiving at the highest levels of function.
To embrace the other, to take the stranger into our lives, to trust that the other is motivated by the same cares and loves as we are, redesigns the human race. It is the ability to allow human feeling to become a reputable foundation for decision-making at the highest levels that engenders the necessary antidote to a depraved rationalism. For too long have we allowed a false masculinity to guide the judgments of the church and justify the character of the corporate world and engorge a suicidal militarism and direct the policies of governments and reduce humanity to the rationalization of objectivity and deny the people of the world the validity of the feminine, of the feelings, in both women and men.
Reason has become the human sin; independence and individualism our pathology. Facts we have aplenty. It is feelings we lack.
The time to embrace is now, before autonomy destroys community and leaves us less human at the end of our evolutionary process than when we began. Adoration of the rational has not worked. Only embrace can save us now.
––from For Everything A Season, by Joan Chittister (Orbis)
