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St. Benedict (Excerpts from St. Gregory’s Abbey)
When St. Benedict began to form his first monastery in about A.D. 500, he was the inheritor of almost two centuries of monastic tradition. He respected the ascetic lives of the early Desert Fathers, but felt that the values of the communal life with a more moderate asceticism were much more realistic for most of the men who were presenting themselves for the monastic life. Benedict taught a middle way between radical asceticism and a life of indulgence: monks should eat adequate amounts of food, but not too much; they should have adequate amounts of sleep, but not too much. Benedict did not urge his monks to storm Heaven and win salvation in one day. Rather, Benedict showed himself to be realistic about human nature. He knew that even men who choose to devote themselves to a life of worship will have their foibles and that any change for the better will take many years of struggle. Benedict enjoined an asceticism more relaxed than that of the early monks, which stressed leading a gradual journey to God in which one never loses sight of the goal of Heaven. The practice may be moderate, but it is still uncompromising in its devotion to God.
When St. Benedict organized a monastic community in the early sixth century and wrote a Rule for his followers, he was not trying to solve the social conflicts that were tearing the Italian peninsula apart at the time. Benedict's focus was in leading his community into living the Christian life centered on acts of worship. But when the Roman Empire collapsed in Europe, the church and its monasteries, in particular, were among the few institutions which could keep society together. Benedict's Rule was only one among many at the time, but its flexibility and practical common sense in living the Christian life from day to day eventually made it the normative monastic rule in Europe.
Worship is the most important act of Christian living. Worship keeps us in touch with God who loves us unconditionally and wills that we love Him rather than use Him for our own purposes. Worship teaches us is that we need bridges between ourselves and God and between ourselves and our neighbors, that we need to be healed and to heal others, and that we need to be fed by more than just the food we eat. (From St. Gregory’s Abbey)
Benedictine Living Although St. Benedict wrote his Rule for a monastic community which would not be living the same kind of life as other Christians, the fact that he was applying fundamental Christian values to his community means that many of his teachings will have applications for all Christians. In the historical survey, emphasis was placed on Benedict's middle path between harsh asceticism and self- indulgence. There are also many other ways in which Benedict shows his sense of balance. For example, he stresses the need for his monks to be deeply involved in the interpersonal relationships of community, but also to reserve generous amounts of time for solitude in order to relate to God as responsible individuals. He also demonstrates an uncanny balance between a realistic appraisal of human behavior and an idealistic hope for what people can become with the grace of God. Most significantly, the basic rhythm of the monastic life of worship, study, and work, as outlined in the Rule, is a particularly strong instance of St. Benedict's sense of balance. St. Benedict also has challenging teachings to offer us on such difficult matters as humility and obedience. Each of these teachings can help us question the attitudes and practices of our time.
Humility The fundamental virtue for living the Christian life as Benedict envisions it is humility. This virtue not a popular one today, but it was so important to Benedict that we must reflect on it. To begin with, humility is essential for the imitation of Christ. Benedict quotes Phil. 2:6-11 where St. Paul celebrates the humility of Christ as the example for all Christians to follow in their lives. Humility is the disposition which opens the way to the act of repentance, so central to progress in the Christian life. Humility is, in essence, a turning away from the many fantasies we entertain concerning ourselves, the world around us, and God; and a turning towards reality as God sees it.
The first step toward humility is the awareness of God's constant presence. We must remember that we "are always seen by God in heaven, that [our] actions everywhere are in God's sight and are reported by the angels." Through humility, the monk is of the disposition to receive truth, not only through the Word of God revealed in Scripture, but also through God's revelations in daily community life. Thus, when Benedict discusses matters of deportment, such as avoiding boisterous laughter and keeping the eyes downcast, these are not simply rigid commands for external behavior. Rather, Benedict is saying that when one is humble, one does not have to "put on an act" to draw attention to oneself. The virtue of humility is the virtue of acting naturally.
In an era when we have become sensitive to the destructive result of growing up with a negative self- image, it may seem that humility can do more harm than good. After all, we have discovered that it is hard to function well in life and to relate to God when we don't feel reasonably good about ourselves. However, if humility is primarily the way to truth, then humility not only guards us against a swollen ego, but a shrunken one as well. In humility we may learn that we are not always as good as we think we are, but we also learn that we are also not as bad as we think.
Benedictine Teaching on Prayer Benedictines have, more often than not, maintained a basic tendency to prefer simplicity to complexity in the approach to prayer. This simpler approach is turning out to be helpful to more and more people in our time. Benedictine teaching also stresses the pursuit of balance between liturgical prayer and inner prayer, with both being important elements.
Spiritual Reading of Scripture Reading the Bible is something that many devout Christians do regularly. However, it is also a practice that many find easy to drop and the hard to keep up in a helpful way. The Benedictine tradition has kept alive a tradition of prayerful reading of scripture which can greatly enrich one's encounter with scripture. This practice is conveniently called by its Latin name Lectio Divina or lectio for short.
Lectio is approached with the conviction that the Bible is the Word of God and will, when read prayerfully, lead the reader to a deeper knowledge and love of God and also to a deeper awareness of self in relation to God. Learning to do lectio means unlearning reading habits that we are taught today. We are used to reading for information, and that is good and necessary for many things. But lectio is reading for insight, not insight in the sense of getting new ideas, but insight in the sense of absorbing the Word of the God in the depths of our being. In doing lectio, one may ask questions of the text, and of God, but then one sits back and just lets God's Word sink in. In lectio, reading becomes an act of prayer.
Ministry of Prayer The community of St. Gregory's Abbey remains committed to a sevenfold office, that is, seven times of worship each day, and also to a daily Eucharist. We follow the office with the distribution of the Psalms outlined in Benedict's Rule except for omitting one morning office and redistributing those Psalms to other services, so that, during a normal week we do all of the Psalms at least once. We start the day of worship at 4:00 a.m. and end the day with the Office of Compline at 7:45 p.m. We use our own adaptation of the Benedictine Office based on current guidelines from the Benedictine Abbot Primate's office in Rome. The two early morning offices (at 4:00 a.m. and 6:00 a.m.) are mostly spoken, but we chant the Psalms at the other services. We use modern plainchant tones for these services, except for Vespers when we use our own version of restored traditional plain chant tones.
The act of prayer is itself a ministry to the Church and the world. I had the opportunity to reflect on the significance of our prayer as ministry when a guest asked me why there was so little intercessory prayer; that is, praying directly for the needs of others. He had come to us thinking we were praying for him and everybody else and he felt that we were not doing very much of that after all. Part of my answer was that we get many requests for intercessory prayers and we do more with them than just read out the intentions during the Eucharist. These prayer intentions are distributed among the community and we each have some of them for a few days so as to make the praying of whole offices given over to these intentions. Moreover, the comprehensiveness of the Psalter which I pointed out above also suggests that in the Divine Office we are praying the Psalms for the whole people of God. A deeper point, of course, is the mystery that we do not, and ought not, know what God does with our acts of prayer. We pray with the conviction that prayer is, in itself, a good thing to do and that it pleases God. The value of prayer cannot be measured by practical considerations any more than the value of a deep friendship can be measured by what we hope to "get out of it." We pray with the trust that God will use our prayers for the benefit of others in the ways He sees fit. |
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Our Saint |
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In service to One. |
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St. Benedict’s Knights of Columbus Council 14785 • 11625 Falcon Hwy. • Falcon, CO 80831 |