The Benedictine way of life does have all the answers to all of life’s problems and questions. It doesn’t guarantee any form of worldly success, promotion or advancement. It doesn’t promise a life of comfort and ease. Rather, the Benedictine way of life offers a process for becoming more of what God created a person to be. The Benedictine way of life is for those who “strive to enter the narrow gate,” to borrow the words of Jesus from the Gospel of Luke proclaimed last Sunday. It is a life of striving, of pouring all of one’s efforts and energy into a single-minded purpose and goal—abundant and everlasting life.
The Rule of St. Benedict is a guide and a tool for how one’s striving ought to unfold, but it isn’t a recipe book of exact formulas to create pre-determined outcomes. The Rule of St. Benedict suggests a process for undertaking the “striver’s journey” for those who “yearn for life and desire to see good days” [RB Prol.15; Ps 33(34):13]. For those who hear the call of God with the ear of her or his heart, the Rule offers a way of proceeding that is more successful than not if it is followed with sincerity.
More than anything else, the Rule of St. Benedict is a commentary on the Gospel of Jesus Christ and a suggested means by which the teachings of the Gospel are to be put into practice on a daily, even hourly, basis. It sounds fairly simple; however, applying it in specific times and situations gets complicated, especially when human differences of perspective, experience, personality, physical limitations, and cultural bias are thrown into the mix.
We who have undertaken this “striver’s journey” according to the Rule of St. Benedict must daily remind ourselves of our common goal to seek God and the things of God as a community of believers. Benedictines are not solitaries. We do not act alone. We are not self-sufficient, nor self-reliant. In practical matters, on occasion, this may slip our mind when personal preferences differ from the preference of the larger group. Yet, it is our dependence on one another that is the living out of our commitment to be utterly dependent on God. In the ritual of monastic profession, the disciple prays, “Receive me, O Lord, as you have promised that I may live. Disappoint me not in my hope.”
The life-long quest of the individual monastic lived in community is a parallel of the life-long quest of the monastic community itself. Abundant and everlasting life is the common goal of the monastic community as a whole, seeking the will of God in a life of prayer and service, meeting the needs of the time and the place in which it finds itself. It may look different in different times of a community’s history. In fact, it ought to do so because a living being is always to be growing and changing. The LIFE that is in this way of life is the solid relationship that the members have with one another in a bond of holy love. Because we are sinners, we are constantly needing to be reconciled with one another. It is the love of Christ and the grace of the Holy Spirit that makes this possible. In truth, this is the primary “work” of the monastic community in conjunction with praying the Liturgy of the Hours.
It is the process of the monastic way of life that makes us “skinny” enough to make it through the narrow gate of which Christ speaks. It teaches humility, obedience, detachment and all sorts of other godly virtues if we just keep at it with intentional effort and hope in God’s mercy.
As I draw this blog to a close, I can hear in the back of my mind the mantra of Dori the fish in the movie Finding Nemo: “Just keep swimming. Just keep swimming….” Life, that is, abundant life, is what we experience when our thoughts and actions are swimming with the flow of God’s will and activity. May it be so; just keep swimming!
By Sister Therese Haydel, OSB
