Surrender...

Walk with me.  There is a remarkable consistency running beneath the differences of language, temperament, and theology. The desert mothers and fathers, Augustine, Benedict, the medieval mystics, the Reformers, Teresa and John of the Cross, de Caussade, the modern contemplatives—all wrestle with essentially the question we've been asking:

If God is already present, how do we become capable of living in that Presence?

History's answer is almost never, find the right idea. It is much closer to: become the kind of person who can receive what has already been given.

1. We begin by turning

The oldest word is metanoia—turning, changing one's mind, reorienting one's life.

The desert fathers fled into the desert not because they believed God lived there rather than in Alexandria, but because they discovered how difficult it was to hear God through the noise of an undisciplined life. Their first work was exceedingly practical: watch your thoughts, restrain your appetites, tell the truth about yourself, forgive, pray, work, become quiet.

Benedict makes the same beginning more humane and communal. Amend your ways. Correct the faults. Safeguard love. Walk the way.

At first, therefore, the path feels narrow. We are learning what not to do. We are discovering how much of what we call "ourselves" is actually habit, appetite, fear, resentment, vanity, distraction.

This is purification—not becoming worthy of God, but clearing away the debris that prevents us from recognizing God.

2. Discipline slowly becomes disposition

This is where Sister Joan's observation about affectation matters enormously.

We cannot simply admire holiness. We cannot adopt the vocabulary, mannerisms, emotions, or appearance of spirituality and thereby possess it.

The spiritual life must be practiced until it becomes our life—who we are.

The early monks called this askesis: training. Benedict gives it rhythm—prayer, Scripture, silence, work, obedience, community, humility.

At first I consciously practice patience.

Eventually I become more patient.

At first I deliberately stop myself from judging.

Eventually the need to judge begins to weaken.

At first I make myself listen.

Eventually I become a listening person.

This is why the path and grace are not two competing explanations. Discipline does not manufacture God. Discipline makes us increasingly receptive to the God who is already acting.

We practice; grace transforms.

3. Then comes illumination: we learn to see

Here Augustine becomes especially important.

We begin our spiritual lives by looking under every bush for God.

Where is he?

Which book has the answer?

Which teacher?

Which practice?

Which church?

Which experience?

And eventually Augustine makes the astonishing discovery:

God was nearer to him than he was to himself.

The search changes direction.

But even "looking within" can be misleading if it means intense self-examination. The contemplative tradition gradually says something more subtle:

Do not merely look inward.
Become quiet enough to notice.

Hence Benedict:

Listen.

The desert tradition: guard the heart.

The Cloud of Unknowing: relinquish the compulsion to comprehend God intellectually.

Eckhart: become empty.

Teresa: enter the interior castle.

John of the Cross: allow attachments—even spiritual attachments—to fall away.

The language differs. The movement is strikingly similar.

4. Eventually we discover that God is doing the seeking

This may be the great reversal in the spiritual life.

Initially:

I am looking for God.

Later:

God is calling me.

Deeper still:

God has been seeking me all along.

That explains the beautiful paradox in Sister Joan's language about centering ourselves where the God we are seeking is seeking us.

Suddenly the spiritual life is no longer primarily an achievement.

It becomes response.

And therefore surrender begins to replace striving.

Not passivity. Not indifference. Not abandoning moral responsibility.

Rather:

I cease trying to control the encounter.

This is where grace becomes unmistakable.

5. Surrender leads us back into the present moment

And here the mystical tradition becomes surprisingly practical.

If God is present, where shall I meet God?

Not yesterday.

Not in the imagined person I shall someday become.

Not after I have conquered all my faults.

Not when I finally learn how to pray properly.

Here. Now.

De Caussade calls this the sacrament of the present moment. Benedict simply constructs an entire life around it: this prayer, this brother or sister, this task, this meal, this interruption, this moment of obedience.

The extraordinary spiritual discovery is that the path to God does not finally lead away from ordinary life.

It leads more deeply into it.

6. And then comes the final transformation: love

This is why Benedict's seemingly modest phrase "safeguard love" may actually contain the destination.

The proof of communion with God is not mystical sensation.

It is not spiritual knowledge.

It is not ascetic accomplishment.

It is the transformation of the person toward love.

John says it bluntly: whoever loves knows God.

Augustine says, in effect, love rightly and act from that love.

Benedict concludes his Rule not with an esoteric mystical technique but with good zeal: honor one another, bear weaknesses patiently, seek the other's good, prefer nothing whatever to Christ.

The search that begins with "Where is God?" ends strangely with "How shall I love?"

And perhaps that is because they turn out to be almost the same question.

We cannot cause communion with God, but we can consent to it.

That reconciles the two voices we have been hearing throughout the tradition:

Practice. Discipline yourself. Walk the way.

and

Surrender. Receive. Only by grace.

They are not competing paths.

Practice teaches us how to surrender.

And surrender finally reveals what practice could never accomplish by itself.

There is even a classic Christian pattern for this journey. The ancient and medieval writers often describe three movements:

Purgation → Illumination → Union

Maybe we if use the language we have been developing through Benedict, we could make it warmer and more alive:

Turn → Practice → Listen → Surrender → Love.

Or perhaps even more beautifully:

Walk the way.

Learn to listen.

Discover that God is already near.

Surrender the need to control the encounter.

And live, here and now, in love.

That last formulation feels to me very close to where we began. It preserves both sides of the great paradox: 

We must undertake the journey with everything we possess—and eventually
discover that the One toward whom we have been walking
has been carrying us all along.

Lead the way...

Today, Benedict reminds us in the most unambiguous way, we must prepare our hearts and bodies for the battle of Holy Obedience. What Benedict understood is that we are ever vulnerable to our selfish self-centered desires. If you choose, you can attribute this to the work of the dark force within each of us, or you might instead choose to simply embrace that we are weak human creatures, lacking the strength to follow the way—unaided. 

What is not possible to us by nature,
let us ask the Holy One to supply by the help of grace. 
... by the light of life—we must run and do now what will profit us forever.

We are truly not alone in this undertaking. But we must ask for his saving grace. If we do this, we will prevail. But we must ask. God will not fail us.  But God wants us to be partners in this enterprise. If we attempt this alone, we will fail. We will succumb to our own willful hearts, seeking to satisfy our most base desires.

We must open our eyes today to our behavior and witness our actions through his eyes. We must surrender so that God can be in control.

God is with us, holding us up so that the reign of God
may be made plain in us and become hope to others.
If we can become peacemakers, if we can control our need to control,
if we can distinguish between our wants and needs, than anybody can.

Lead the way child!

Surrender my child....

Whoever hears...

Listen carefully, my child....with the ear of the heart

With these few words, Benedict invites us to believe—to listen—in a way that many of us, in the beginning, do not understand. We should not be surprised by this. It took the apostles quite sometime before they understood what Christ was offering of them—the open armed acceptance of the living God.

After reaching the age of reason many of us began to believe that most gifts involve an exchange. For many of us, the idea that the living God is in us, a part of us, integral to our being, and is waiting for us to embrace Him, is difficult to comprehend.

If you find yourself continuing to search for your heart's ear, I invite you to read once more the nature of listening in the silence. As you read, be at peace.  Read slowly, hold each phrase gently in your mind—allow it to challenge you and to stir your soul.

Benedict and Sister Joan invite us to accept that the living God is present in us at all times. He is the air we breathe—our task is not to put God into our lives. Our task is to acceptance that He is already there—waiting for us. For those of you to whom music speaks most clearly, take a moment and tap the play button at the end of today's meditation.

Sister Joan invites us today to recognize the efforts that we are making to seek out God, to prove our worthiness, to demonstrate to ourselves and others that we are on a pilgrimage to find God. And, as Sister Joan suggests, we may even be keeping score: so many daily masses, so many rosaries, so many fast days. We do not need to seek Him—He is here in us now, ever present, ever aware of our joy, our pain, our longing for Him.

All we need is an open and contrite heart, and surrender, believing, "I know you're with me. You hear my voice. You hear my every thought.  I am now listening."

So why is this so difficult?  Why do we have so much trouble listening with the ear of our heart? I fear it is because we want to be in charge—we lack the sincere desire to surrender control of our lives.

Go forward today and listen. He's talking to you.

By His Grace....

Benedict reminds us today that if we want to dwell in God's tent, we must walk the way and live in and support our community. For it is in walking the away we will learn to be just in all things, to speak truth from the heart, not practice deceit, and care for those with whom we live. 

To accomplish this, we must, in time, learn to foil the evil one—flinging both the devil and his wicked promptings far from sight— dashing them against the Living Christ within us. You see, Benedict understood that it's God's strength, not our own, that brings about the good in us. Give God the glory by His name alone.

It all begins with a devout and contrite heart, and surrender. All we need to do is ask—with sincerity—for it is God who gives us the strength. We do not of our own arrive at these wisdom's. God will give us eyes to see the wonders of this world. We are not a power unto ourselves.

Then, most amazingly, we will see we are responsible for each other. This is our metric for right living. Only through God, will we be able to rise above ourselves.

And so it begins with our understanding that by his grace we are obligated to our community and dependent on God alone.

If we must—use words....

 Listen my child...

 Is there anyone here who yearns for life and desires to see good days?

Benedict begins today with a beautiful, most simple and so difficult challenge, "keep your tongue free from vicious, talk, and your lips from all deceit; turn away from evil and do good; let peace be your quest and aim. (Ps. 34:14-15)"

From the beginning, God bides us to live a "good life." In the words of Benedict, "What is more delightful than this voice of the Holy One calling to us? See how God's love shows us the way of life."

John Mark Comer, in Following the Way, made this so very clear, we are called, we are invited to be the living Christ, to follow the way. As we work toward this goal, the living Christ within us will surely be pleased, and ever present to help us on the journey.

Sister Joan works to help us understand the challenges we will face along the way, the destructive talk about another person, anger, vengefulness. These are not foot stones along His path. We are called at all times, to not be part of this decline. Not only must we not engage in these behaviors, but we are called to help rebuild this tired and broken world.

As you begin this work, the Rule reminds us, God will be beside you, and his ears will listen for your prayers. We are called to be the peacemakers. We are called to do his work in this world. We are called to gentle the universe.

Sister Joan eloquently reminds us that in this Rule of life, violence is simply discounted. Violence doesn't work! Not political violence, not social violence, not physical violence, not even the violence that we do to ourselves in the name of religion. When will we learn!

Yes! Benedict calls us to live in this world, not only without weapons, but also by doing good. It is a strong message, clothed in words, long dulled by repetition, a challenge best echoed by—show we are His followers and if we must—use words!

A Reminder....

About the Rule of Benedict
Benedict of Nursia was born in the year 480. As a student in Rome, he tired of the decadent culture around him and left to live a simple spiritual life as a hermit in the countryside of Subiaco about thirty miles outside of the city. It wasn't long, however, before he was discovered both by the people of the area and disciples who were themselves looking for a more meaningful way of life. Out of these associations sprang the monastic life that would eventually cover Europe.

The Rule of Benedict is not a treatise in systematic theology. Its logic is the logic of daily life lived in Christ and lived well. This early monastic rule is part of the Wisdom tradition of Christianity and is rooted in the Bible for its inspiration and its end. It deals with the meaning and purpose of life. The positions taken in the Rule in the light of themes in the wisdom literature of other culture find Benedict of Nursia in the stream of thinkers who lived out of a single tradition but from the perspective of universal and fundamental insights into life.

Excerpted from The Rule of Benedict: Insights for the Ages by Joan Chittister, OSB

It is time....

Today Benedict calls us to arise, to open our eyes to the light that comes from God:

Run while you have the light of life,

so that the darkness of death may not overtake you.

There is urgency here. Wake up. Listen now. Begin today. Follow the way.

What a challenging way to begin the morning!

Sister Joan immediately recognizes one of our most persistent habits: postponement. We admire the discipline of others. We wonder where they find their resolve. We tell ourselves that someday we too will pray more faithfully, listen more carefully, live more deliberately, love more generously.

But Benedict will not allow us the comfort of someday.

Sister Joan puts it beautifully:

We are called daily to center ourselves where the 

God we are seeking is seeking us. Listen today. Start now.

Begin immediately to direct your life to that small, clear voice within.

Every morning we awaken and almost instinctively ask, “What time is it?”

Benedict asks us to hear that question differently.  What time is it? It is time to awaken. It is time to remember who we are. It is time to become the person God is calling us to become.

John Mark Comer would recognize Benedict’s urgency immediately. We cannot simply admire Jesus or agree with his teaching. We must arrange our lives around following him—learning to be with Jesus, become like Jesus, and live as Jesus lived. A rule of life exists precisely because our deepest intentions so easily disappear beneath the distractions of an ordinary day.

Augustine knew something about postponement. For years he stood at the threshold of conversion wanting God—but not quite yet. His great discovery was that the God for whom he had been searching was already present, nearer to him than he was to himself. 

The moment of grace was not tomorrow. It was now.

Luther would remind us that this awakening is not simply an achievement of willpower. We rise because grace has already come looking for us. Every morning is another beginning, another return to the Gospel, another opportunity to receive again what we could never manufacture for ourselves.

And so Benedict tells us to run toward the light—Scripture in hand, heart awake, attentive to the presence of God in every person and every moment.

We are called to pray.

We are called to listen.

We are called to care for one another and for the community entrusted to us.

We are called to become what we profess to believe.

Not someday.

It is time.

Listen....

Every good story has a strong beginning—and the Rule of Benedict begins with a single word:

Listen.

“Listen carefully, my child, to my instructions, and attend to them with the ear of your heart.”

Before Benedict tells us what to do, he asks us to become still enough to hear. Before obedience, before discipline, before prayer or work or community, we must listen. The spiritual life begins by devotion to full awareness—the simple but most challenging task of devoted listening.

Today, we are surrounded by voices competing for our attention—news, opinions, responsibilities, anxieties, memories, screens, and the endless conversation going on within our own minds. Yet beneath all this noise Benedict whispers: Listen.

The desert mothers and fathers understood this well. They went into the desert not simply to escape the world, but to become quiet enough to discover what was happening within themselves. They learned that silence is not merely the absence of sound. It is the clearing of an inner space where truth can be heard.

That same wisdom lies at the heart of most contemporary spiritual teaching. Again and again we are reminded that the great enemy of the spiritual life is not disbelief but inattention. We can move through an entire day without really inhabiting it. We can see without seeing, hear without hearing, speak without understanding, pray without listening.

Benedict calls us back to consciousness.

Pay attention to the person before you.

Pay attention to what is stirring within you.

Pay attention to beauty.

Pay attention to pain.

Pay attention to the unexpected interruption.

Pay attention to the quiet prompting
that asks you to stop, reconsider,
forgive, speak, remain silent, or begin again.

This is where God waits for us—not somewhere beyond our lives, but within them. And Benedict gives us another wonderfully reassuring instruction: whenever we begin some good work, ask God to bring it to completion.

We need not begin this new reading of the Rule with great resolutions. We do not have to remake ourselves overnight. We need only begin—and invite God into the beginning.

There is a deep calm in that realization. Everything does not depend upon us. Our task is to listen, to consent, to take the next faithful step, and to remain open to grace. God will do the deeper work.

Sister Joan Chittister brings a necessary urgency to Benedict's invitation. How easily our lives become attached to hopes that cannot finally satisfy us—to success, possessions, approval, control, certainty, even to the image we have constructed of ourselves. Sooner or later these promises reveal their emptiness.

And then comes her extraordinary reminder:

We have been loved to life by God.

Perhaps that is where this journey through the Rule should begin. Not with fear. Not with guilt. Not with another list of things we ought to become.

We are already loved into being. Our spiritual life is our response to that love. So we begin again.

We listen. We ask God to enter what we are about to undertake. 
We try to live consciously enough to recognize
the divine presence hidden within ordinary things. 

And when we fail—as we certainly will—we listen again.

Benedict promises something beautiful to those who remain on the way. At first the path may seem narrow, demanding, even difficult. But gradually something happens: the heart expands. What once required effort begins increasingly to flow from love.That is the hope with which we begin this new reading cycle.

Not that we will finish the Rule knowing more about Benedict, but that somewhere along the way we may become more awake to God, more attentive to one another, more peaceful within ourselves, and more fully alive. For even now, beneath the noise of our lives, God is speaking.

Our first task is simply to listen.

This is but the beginning....

Benedict drew deeply from the wisdom of those who came before him—from Holy Scripture, the early monastic writers, the Conferences, and the Rule of Basil—to fashion what he humbly called his “little rule for beginners.” Yet he makes clear that the Rule is only a beginning, a place from which we set out toward the “lofty summit.”

So too for us. Reading the Rule matters. Reading Sister Joan’s commentary may help us hear it anew. But neither is the destination. Benedict and Sister Joan call us beyond reading to transformation: a change of heart, a change of life.

We are called, finally, not merely to read the holy Word, but to become it.

As John Mark Comer reminds us in Practicing the Way, the spiritual life is lived through practice. If we read, listen, and open ourselves deeply, we become increasingly attuned to God’s presence, disposed to do God’s will, and the wisdom to be found in the present.

And that is only the beginning.

Here....

In monastic language, zeal is a much richer word than our modern sense of “enthusiasm.” It means something closer to ardor, passionate devotion, earnestness, or an intense desire directed toward some object. And that intensity is morally neutral until we see what it is directed toward and what kind of fruit it produces.

The English zeal comes through Latin zelus from the Greek zēlos. In Greek the word could mean fervor, eagerness, and emulation—but also jealousy, rivalry, and envy. That double meaning is important. Zeal is a kind of spiritual heat. The same fire can warm a community or burn it down.

This is precisely the distinction Benedict makes in Chapter 72, “The Good Zeal of Monks.” He contrasts the bitter zeal that separates us from God with the good zeal that separates us from vice and leads us toward God and everlasting life. And Benedict finally brings the whole matter to one uncompromising center: prefer nothing whatever to Christ. As John Mark Comer might put it, we must not simply admire Christ; we must follow the Way.

Sister Joan brings Benedict's teaching wonderfully close to home. Benedictine spirituality, she reminds us, is about loving God and learning to love the people who surround us. Holiness is not somewhere else. It is not waiting for us in a more dramatic life, a more congenial community, or among people easier to love. It is here.

And here may be one of the most important words in the spiritual life.

The Holy One is encountered here—in this person, this interruption, this disappointment, this ordinary day. Wisdom is found here, but only if we are present enough to recognize it.

That is why Sister Joan calls good zeal the spirituality of “the long haul.” Good zeal carries us through the days when nothing seems particularly holy, when prayer is dry, community is difficult, and our lives appear painfully ordinary. Benedict reminds us that sanctity is rarely made of spectacular gestures. More often it is fashioned quietly through patience, humility, obedience, forgiveness, and the repeated choice to put another before ourselves.

Perhaps that is the final test of our zeal. Does the fire within us draw us toward ourselves—or toward Christ and one another?

For Benedict, there can be little doubt.

The good zeal is the fire by which we slowly learn to prefer nothing to Christ—and therefore to discover Christ here, in one another.

 

We are called....

Chapter 71 of the Rule confronts us with one of the most difficult spiritual words of our time: obedience.

Sister Joan is quick to recognize the problem. We have learned, sometimes through terrible experience, that obedience cannot mean simply doing what we are told. History is littered with the consequences of unquestioning allegiance—to rulers, nations, institutions, ideologies, religious authorities, and even to the passions of the crowd. Again and again, human beings have surrendered conscience to certainty and called it virtue.

The great tragedies of history teach us something sobering: evil rarely presents itself to us simply as evil. More often it comes wrapped in righteousness, loyalty, patriotism, religion, security, or the conviction that our side possesses the truth.

And yet Benedict does not tell us to trust only ourselves.  That would be another kind of blindness.

We are not our own teachers, our own guides, our own standard-setters, or laws unto ourselves. The solitary conscience can become every bit as arrogant as the tyrant. We can deceive ourselves remarkably well. We hear what confirms us. We dismiss what threatens us. We surround ourselves with people who reassure us that we are right.  So Benedict proposes something much more demanding than either blind obedience or absolute independence.

He asks us to listen to one another.

Wisdom does not flow only downward from authority. It moves horizontally—from person to person, heart to heart. The person beside me may possess a fragment of truth that I desperately need.  And, most unsettling of all, so may my adversary.

What truth might God be asking me to hear from them?

We are not being asked to accept blindly or tolerate injustice. There are moments when conscience requires resistance. But even resistance must be rooted in humility rather than hatred. Otherwise we risk becoming what we oppose.

The deepest obedience, then, may be obedience

to the truth itself—wherever truth appears.  We must be prepared to rebel
the moment we are overwhelmed by blind feels of certainty!

It requires the humility to say, I may be wrong. The patience to listen beneath anger. The wisdom to distinguish authority from truth. And the grace to discover that God may speak through the person we least expected to hear.

Perhaps this is one of the great lessons history leaves us: civilizations begin to fracture when people cease listening to one another. When opponents become enemies, when disagreement becomes betrayal, when certainty replaces humility, community begins to die.  Sound familiar?

Benedict offers another way.

Listen.

Listen to authority.

Listen to conscience.

Listen to the community.

Listen to the wounded.

Listen to the stranger.

Listen to the one who stands against you.

And beneath all these voices, listen for the quiet movement of God.

We grow not by proving ourselves right, but by allowing truth to change us. 

We become more fully what God is calling us to become when we can see our own failures clearly, receive the wisdom of others gratefully, correct what must be corrected, forgive what must be forgiven, and continue together.

Perhaps that is the obedience Benedict ultimately seeks: not the surrender of the mind, but the opening of the heart.

Heavenly Father, grant us an obedience courageous enough to listen, humble enough to change, discerning enough to resist what is wrong, and loving enough never to abandon the human being standing on the other side.

For in the end, we are not called simply to be right.

We are called to become love in the world.

Never surrender goodness as we strive for good....

There is something quietly unsettling in Chapter 70. Benedict is not simply telling members of the monastery not to strike one another. He is confronting something much more subtle and much more dangerous: the human temptation to believe that being right gives us permission to do wrong.

Sister Joan reveals this simple truth with extraordinary clarity: “The desire for good is no excuse for the exercise of evil in its behalf.”

Most of us do not deliberately set out to become cruel, vindictive, controlling, or dismissive. Quite the contrary. Striving for good, we seek justice. We want truth. We want to protect the community. Yes, we frequently want someone corrected. We want things done properly. We may even believe we are defending God, morality, tradition, country, church, family, or another person.

And therein lies the danger.

For once we become convinced of the righteousness of our cause, it becomes remarkably easy to excuse the violence that may follow.

We begin to justify the cutting remark because someone needed to say it.
We humiliate because they deserved to be corrected.
We exclude because they are causing trouble.
We refuse to listen because we know what is right.
We attack another person's character while telling ourselves we are defending the truth.

The blows Benedict forbids need not be delivered by the hand.

Benedictine spirituality offers another way. It insists that the manner in which we seek the good must itself be good. We cannot create peace through hatred. Community cannot be built through humiliation. Truth cannot be served by cruelty. We must not defend love through hate.

The means are not incidental to the spiritual life. The means are the spiritual life.

This is why Sister Joan's warning is so profound: to become what we hate is neither the goal nor the greatness of the spiritual life.

The great spiritual danger is not simply that hatred exists somewhere outside us. It is that, in opposing hatred, we may slowly permit hatred to enter us.

And then the enemy has won.

The Benedictine way asks use to:

• stand for truth—but do not cease loving;
• resist injustice—but do not surrender your soul to hatred;
• correct when correction is necessary—but never forget the sacred humanity of the person before you.

The victory of the spiritual life is not merely
overcoming evil, it is confronting evil without allowing
evil to teach us how to live.

Pray for humanity and all the nations of this world....

A tempered heart....

There is a kind of love that comforts, shelters, and defends. But there is another kind of love—perhaps a harder one—that knows when to stand nearby and allow another person to live through the difficulty that life has placed before them.

We are called to bear one another’s burdens, but we are not called to remove every burden. Sometimes our eagerness to defend another springs from genuine compassion; yet sometimes, without realizing it, we may deny them the very struggle through which wisdom, strength, and grace are being born.

Life is not perfect. People disappoint us. We are misunderstood. Things go unfairly. There are wounds we cannot prevent and circumstances we cannot repair. Much of spiritual maturity lies in learning, as Sister Joan suggests, to endure “the average heat of the average day”—to receive both its pain and its blessing with a tempered heart.

Perhaps friendship sometimes asks us simply to remain present: not to rescue, not to take sides, not to make another’s difficulty our battle, but to say quietly, I am here. I will walk beside you.

For sometimes the most loving thing we can do is allow those we love to grow.

It is not abandonment.

It is trust.

And sometimes, it is simply life.

Leadership on the road of life....

Authority is never given simply to elevate the person who holds it. Authority exists for the sake of peace and charity. The higher one stands in a community, the more carefully one must guard against pride. Leadership is not possession but service—a responsibility entrusted to us for the good of others.

The porter stands at the threshold, ready to receive whoever comes with gentleness and warmth. Sr. Joan sees something larger than hospitality. The spiritual life requires both openness and rootedness. We open the door to life without surrendering the quiet center from which we meet it.

And inevitably, we must go beyond the door. We journey into the world, carrying the prayers of the community with us. We do not travel alone. We belong to one another even in absence, and what happens to one of us matters to all.

Perhaps that is where Sr. Joan has been leading us. The centered life does not protect us from difficult things. It prepares us to meet them. Benedict allows us to speak honestly about our limits, but he also cautions us against assuming too quickly that our limits are final.

Sometimes God waits just beyond the boundary of what we believe we can do.

The Benedictine life is neither withdrawal nor restless striving. It is the quiet practice of remaining rooted in God—serving humbly, welcoming generously, journeying prayerfully, and trusting that when we reach the limits of our own strength—grace will abide.

Heavenly Father

As we open doors and walk down the corridors of life,
keep us focused on you.

When we are given authority,
make us servants.

When someone comes to our door,
teach us to receive them with love.

When we journey beyond familiar places,
remind us that we never travel alone.

And when we are challenged 
sometimes beyond our strength,
give us humility to speak truthfully,
courage to continue faithfully,
and trust enough to discover
what, through your grace, 
you can accomplish through us.

May we seek neither position nor comfort,
but only the grace to become
what you are calling us to be.

Amen.

Authority—what makes a true leader....

In Christian community, authority is never truly ours. It is entrusted to us for a time, and always for the sake of others. The monastic tradition understands this with particular clarity: to be given responsibility is not to be raised above the community, but to be called more deeply into its service.

Christ gives us the pattern. He does not grasp power; he empties himself. He kneels to wash the feet of his disciples. He teaches that the one who would be first must become the servant of all. Christian authority, then, is not possession but stewardship.

The danger comes when we forget this.

Pride quietly changes the question from What does this community need from me? to What does this position say about me? Authority becomes identity. Recognition becomes entitlement. Disagreement becomes threat. We begin protecting our place rather than serving the people entrusted to us.

Benedict offers another way. The leader is to possess goodness of life and wisdom in teaching. The first concerns the inner person: humility, patience, self-knowledge, compassion. The second concerns what happens to others in our presence: Do they grow? Are their gifts strengthened? Does trust deepen? Does the community become more whole?

The monastic commitment to service therefore begins within. Before we can wisely exercise authority over others, we must learn to recognize the movements of our own heart: our desire for praise, our defensiveness, our need to be right, our fear of being diminished.

Humility gives us freedom from these things. It allows us to listen, to change our minds, to give credit away, to welcome the gifts of others, and even to say, I was wrong.

Perhaps this is the deepest test of Christian leadership: Whose good am I seeking?

The mature servant-leader moves gradually from my position to our calling, from my accomplishment to our flourishing, from the desire to be important to the desire to do what is important.

Authority becomes holy when it disappears into service.

And the finest Christian leader may finally be recognized not by how much power was exercised, but by what was left behind: stronger people, deeper trust, shared purpose, and a community drawn more closely together in its common search for God.

Who can lead us....

Benedict is attempting something far more difficult than describing an office. He is trying to describe the character of a person who can be trusted with authority over the lives of others.

Such a task immediately creates a tension. Leadership requires strength, yet Benedict distrusts domination. It requires judgment, yet judgment must be tempered by mercy. The leader must teach, correct, encourage, restrain, and occasionally make difficult decisions—but never forget that the people being led belong ultimately to God, not to the leader.

That may be why Benedict seems less interested in what we would call leadership skills than in the interior formation of the leader. Competence matters, but character matters more. The good leader must possess wisdom, goodness of life, discernment, humility, patience, and an extraordinary awareness of individual differences. What strengthens one person may crush another. What one member needs as correction another may need as encouragement.

And then comes perhaps the most sobering element: the community is called to recognize such a person among its own. Titles, seniority, education, administrative ability, charisma, wealth, or social standing cannot be allowed to substitute for wisdom and goodness.

Benedict therefore makes leadership a spiritual question before it is an organizational one:

Who among us has become sufficiently free of ego
to exercise authority for the good of others?

Perhaps that is Benedict's great contribution to leadership theory. The question is not primarily, Who can get things done? It is:

Who can be entrusted with people?

And those are very different questions.

A good life....

Benedict asks us to look beyond talent, position, accomplishment, and efficiency and to ask a deeper question: What kind of person is this? When choosing an abbot or prioress, the community is to seek goodness of life and wisdom of heart. Everything else is secondary.

Outside the monastery, the same question confronts us every day. We are constantly choosing whom we will trust, whom we will follow, what voices we will listen to, and what values will govern our decisions. Slowly, almost imperceptibly, these choices shape the persons we become.

The Rule reminds us that faith is not simply something we believe; it is something we practice through countless small decisions. We choose patience rather than irritation, generosity rather than possession, truth rather than convenience, compassion rather than judgment. And because we live in community, even when we imagine ourselves alone, our choices touch others. We are always teaching something by the way we live.

Perhaps this is why Benedict places such importance on goodness and wisdom. A good life quietly invites another good life. A wise heart awakens wisdom in another.

Choose, at every turn, whatever leads toward goodness, wisdom, and the fullest life God is offering. Live so that your presence quietly helps others become their best and truest selves.

The first to show honor....

Chapter 63 of the Rule begins with the question of rank, but Benedict soon leads us somewhere deeper. He asks us to consider how we see one another.

Respect begins in small things: in the names we use, in the way we greet one another, in whether we rise, listen, make room, or ask for a blessing. These gestures may seem insignificant, but Benedict understood that the habits of the body can train the heart. Reverence practiced outwardly can slowly awaken reverence within.

The younger are to respect their elders; the elders are to love the younger. Honor moves in both directions. Wisdom is not the possession of age alone, nor does youth lack gifts the community needs. Benedict reminds us of Samuel and Daniel—young voices through whom God spoke to their elders.

The ancient monastic tradition understood this well. The young monk approached the elder saying, “Abba, give me a word,” believing that years of prayer and struggle might have yielded wisdom. Yet the true elder never possessed wisdom as a badge of superiority. He had first learned to listen, obey, struggle, and begin again.

Perhaps this is Benedict’s deeper invitation: we do not know beforehand through whom God will speak.

The elder may offer patience born of suffering. The young may bring fresh vision. The newcomer may notice what the community has ceased to see. The quiet person beside us may carry the word we most need to hear.

Paul says, “Be the first to show honor.” Benedict takes this seriously. Do not wait to be respected. Do not measure whether another has earned your regard. Begin by honoring.

For if every person bears the presence of God, then respect is more than courtesy. It is an act of faith.

We are called to teach and to learn, to love and to serve, to honor and to listen—and always to remain open to the possibility that Christ is speaking through the person before us.

Rank without rivalary....

Chapter 63 may appear to be concerned with something quite ordinary: who stands where, who goes first, who sits before whom. Yet Benedict is doing something spiritually profound. He takes rank away from the usual currencies of the world—age, wealth, education, social class, clerical standing—and places it within the discipline of the community. Ordinarily, one’s place comes simply from the day one entered the monastery; only virtue of life and the abbot’s discernment may alter it. Even the abbot must remember that he will answer to God for every judgment he makes.

In Benedict’s monastery, this mattered greatly. The community could contain noble and poor, learned and illiterate, priest and layman, young and old. Each arrived carrying a history and, perhaps, an accustomed sense of importance. Benedict asks each to lay that history down at the monastery door.

The instinct is deeply rooted in the early Church. James warns Christian assemblies not to give the wealthy the better place while pushing the poor aside (James 2:1–4). Paul tells Timothy that youth does not disqualify him from becoming an example to older believers (1 Timothy 4:12). The community in Acts seeks to become “one heart and soul,” loosening even its grip upon private possession (Acts 4:32). Basil would later make obedience, renunciation, and common life central to monastic formation, while Cassian could describe obedience and humility—not noble birth—as the Christian’s “true nobility.”

Thus Benedictine rank is not a ladder of importance. It is almost the opposite: a means of ending the struggle to establish importance.

When everyone knows his place, no one need fight for a place.

The energy once spent comparing, competing, defending status, or demanding recognition can be gathered into something infinitely greater—the single-minded search for God. Community order becomes spiritual freedom: many stories, many backgrounds, many gifts, but one common direction—toward God.

Monasticism—daily progress toward our God....

Chapter 62 is brief, but Benedict places before us a truth: no office, honor, or calling exempts us from the lifelong work of conversion.

A monk who is ordained priest does not rise above the community. He remains a brother under the Rule, bound to obedience, humility, and discipline. Benedict even insists that he must submit himself more and continue to make “more and more progress toward God.”

The altar is sacred, and priesthood is sacred, but office is not holiness. The danger lies in allowing a role of service to become a source of status. Benedict refuses that temptation. The priest’s place in the community is not secured by title, but by the goodness of his life.

This is not a lesson only for priests. Each of us carries titles, responsibilities, accomplishments, and identities that can quietly become things we stand upon. Benedict asks us instead to let them become places from which we bow down.

We are never finished. We are always beginners. Whatever honor or responsibility comes to us must lead us more deeply into humility, obedience, and love.

The true measure of any vocation is whether it helps us make more and more progress toward God.

Change...a moment of possibilities....

Today, Saint Benedict and Sister Joan leave us with a wonderfully paradoxical thought: the spiritual life is made up of opportunities to begin again.

At first, this seems almost contrary to Benedictine stability. We think of stability as remaining—staying in one place, with one community, faithful to one way of life. Yet Benedict reminds us that stability is not stubbornness. We are not called simply to remain where we are comfortable. We are called to remain faithful to the search for God.

And God is always drawing us forward.

Sometimes that movement may even require leaving behind something good. A monastery may have nourished us, a community may have loved us, a familiar way of living may have served us well—and still God may call us onward. As Sister Joan reminds us, our deepest vocation is not simply to a particular place, but to the will of God.

Perhaps, then, true stability is not rootedness in place so much as rootedness in God.

To live Benedictine stability is to plant ourselves deeply enough in God that we are not afraid of change. We can begin again because the One we seek remains constant.

Every ending may contain an invitation. Every change may conceal grace. And every new beginning may be God whispering once again: Come, follow me.

Radical acceptance....

Chapter 61 speaks to the way the monastery is to treat monastic visitors.  Benedict’s concern is not merely that visitors avoid disruption. Benedict actually invites the abbot to consider whether God may have sent the visitor to teach. That is an extraordinary statement about humility. The stranger is not simply someone whom we tolerate or serve; the stranger may become the bearer of truth.

There is something very ancient here. The Desert Fathers repeatedly warn against becoming so certain of our own spiritual progress that we can no longer be taught. Abba Moses and Abba Poemen return again and again to the necessity of listening before judging. Cassian likewise understood discernment as something developed in conversation rather than possessed privately. Benedict stands within that tradition: wisdom cannot flourish in a closed room.  Hospitality requires a willingness not merely to receive another person, but to allow ourselves to be changed by the encounter.

Benedict does not construct a monastery for people who have completed the spiritual journey. He constructs what he famously calls a school for the Lord’s service. A school assumes that everyone is still learning. The abbot is learning. The senior monastic is learning. The newcomer is learning. And occasionally the person arriving at the gate may be the teacher God has sent.

We are called to learn and to teach at every moment of our lives—and surely the arrival of a stranger offers an opportunity for both. Wisdom, as Sister Joan reminds us, flows in both directions. We are called to open ourselves to the wisdom of others, to value the opportunity to have our assumptions examined, and never to close ourselves against the possibility of challenge.

There is something wonderfully unsettling here. The visitor may see what those who have lived within the monastery for years can no longer see. Hospitality, then, is more than making room at the table. It is making room within ourselves for a truth we do not already possess.

The ancients understood this well. The Desert Fathers repeatedly warned against believing that spiritual maturity meant having nothing more to learn. Cassian placed discernment within conversation and community. Benedict follows them in creating not a community of the perfected, but a school for the Lord’s service—a place where everyone remains both teacher and student.

Once again, Sister Joan reminds us that Benedictine spirituality does not expect perfection. Benedict—and, I believe, the living God—asks instead for our best efforts, our humility, and our continuing willingness to be formed.

Sometimes the person standing at the door has come seeking wisdom—and sometimes God has sent that person carrying wisdom for us..

A willingness to be formed again....

Benedict's concern about the priest is understandable. A priest entering a monastery already possesses an identity, authority, education, sacramental role, and perhaps considerable social standing. Benedict does not reject any of that. But neither will he allow it to determine the priest's place in the community. The priest must become, once again, a beginner. He enters under the Rule just as everyone else does.

That ancient insistence has considerable depth.

The Desert Fathers repeatedly return to something very similar. The person seeking God must relinquish the need to establish who he is, what he knows, and what he has accomplished. Abba Moses, Abba Poemen, and the other desert elders are remarkably suspicious of spiritual self-certainty. Wisdom begins not in knowing that we have arrived, but in recognizing how much remains to be surrendered.

John Cassian carries the thought further. Renunciation is not merely abandoning possessions. There is an interior renunciation—the relinquishment of the habits, assumptions, desires, and self-images by which we have constructed ourselves. 

And there is an important connection with the Tao Te Ching passage Sister Joan introduces. Read gently, "emptying people's minds" need not mean destroying intelligence or individuality. It can suggest emptying ourselves of our insistence upon knowing—particularly our certainty that our previous categories must govern what comes next.

And perhaps every one of us stands before each new day under the same summons:

...if we cling to the past, the future is closed to us,

becomes much more than advice about adaptability. It becomes a statement about conversion.

However, Benedict is actually deeply respectful of memory, tradition, Scripture, inherited wisdom, and stability. He does not ask us to become people without histories. Rather, he asks us not to be imprisoned by our histories. We do not deny what we have been. We surrender our demand that what we have been must determine what we are becoming.

Benedictine conversatio suggests precisely this lifelong willingness to be converted—to allow God, community, circumstance, failure, prayer, work, age, and grace to continually reshape us.

And then, Benedict adds something quite beautiful: beneath all that change stands stability. We stay—and because we stay, we change. We remain with the community, the prayer, the discipline, and the search for God long enough for them to transform us.  A seeming paradox that leads to our conversion. Benedict asks us to be stable enough to change.

We are called to begin again each day—not by denying what has been, but by refusing to be imprisoned by it. Stable enough to change, humble enough to learn again, and empty enough to receive what God has not yet revealed. If we cling to the past, the future closes before us. But if we open our hands, what we have been can become the soil from which God forms what we are still becoming.

To complete in faith what we begin in enthusiasm....

Saint Benedict wrote his Rule and shaped the monastic tradition at an interesting moment in human history. Nobility frequently believed it was to their advantage—and to the child’s—to offer a son or daughter to the monastery in service to God. The poor often felt the same way. Sister Joan reminds us that it was not until the Council of Trent that the Church established an age at which a person might freely profess and become a monastic.

Benedict’s concern was real. He sought to establish conditions that respected the child, the family, and the integrity of the monastic community.

While this chapter clearly speaks to community and equality, at its heart is Benedict’s concern for the seriousness of spiritual commitment. From his wisdom concerning the dedication of children to God, Sister Joan draws a beautiful reminder for us today:

We must learn to complete in faith what we begin in enthusiasm; we must learn to be true to ourselves; we must continue to become what we said we would be, even when accommodation to the immediate seems to be so much more sensible, so much more reasonable, so much easier.

Her words move the chapter beyond its historical setting. Enthusiasm may begin the journey, but fidelity completes it.

In closing, Sister Joan reminds us of the smelting effect of a communal spirituality. We are shaped, refined, and purified through the difficult and patient work of living together. It is in that journey with one another that we learn from one another, grow through one another, and slowly move together toward God.

A lifetime....

Yesterday we were reminded that the work required to become a Benedictine is the work of a lifetime—a lifetime of living until, imperceptibly, we find ourselves changed into what we sought. Do not underestimate this statement. Read it mindfully. Read every word and phrase, for it builds upon itself.

Benedict continues with a call that we hold tightly to the roots of our faith—the inheritance of the past. What is the richness that first drew us to this life? Is it a search for certainty? Or is it something deeper?

Sister Joan does a beautiful job of focusing our attention on Benedict's call to the foundations of community: fidelity to the monastic way of life and obedience. Sanctification becomes the fruit of this new way of thinking and living. It requires a total openness to the constantly emerging challenges of the God-life.

We must live into each of these demands, allowing them to mold, polish, and temper us until we become a people who see the world through eyes informed and softened by the Gospel.

Benedictine spirituality allows the heart to embrace the world with courage, encouraging it with words of love that nourish it and help it grow in faith.

In time, we become increasingly aware of the changing feelings of each day, yet remain bound to the commitments of a lifetime.

A lifetime that begins anew each morning. We must decide what we are all about.
We—you and I—with each new day, re-commiting ourselves to serving God and the world.

 

New Members....

Chapter 58 makes it quite clear that becoming a Benedictine monastic is not a matter of joining an organization. One is, in truth, volunteering to reorder one’s values, priorities, and life. Benedictine spirituality reaches into the depth of the soul. It changes lives, focuses our efforts, and leads us to see the world quite differently than we did before.

As a consequence, the newcomer seeking entry into monastic life may at first encounter what seems like an unwillingness to receive them. But Benedict’s hesitation is not rejection in the ordinary sense. He wants to know whether the desire is sincere—whether the seeker understands something of the transformation that will be asked of them.

The rabbis taught that there are sparks of holiness in everything. It would seem that Benedict wants some evidence that the seeker has felt such a spark within—that this is not an impulsive response to disappointment, loneliness, or unhappy circumstances, but the beginning of a genuine search for God.

Benedict understands that our lives are meant to be lived with purpose and discipline. For many of us, finding that purpose takes time. Finding the willingness to surrender may take even longer.

And here Benedict asks something rather remarkable of us. We cannot set out first to become holy, assuming that holiness will somehow make us faithful. Instead, we are asked to practice fidelity—even when we fail—in the hope that through fidelity we may someday become holy.

Benedict knows that once we begin to glimpse the demands of the spiritual life, we will fail, and fail often. His first measure of the seeker, therefore, is not perfection but perseverance: How determined are you to embrace this new life?

And perhaps most beautifully, Benedict understands that the senior chosen to accompany the newcomer must be gentle. The guide must understand the difficulty of the road ahead.

Transformation requires determination—but it also requires patience, compassion, and someone willing to walk beside us while we learn how to surrender.