THEMES IN BENEDICTINE LIFE

Our Lady Queen Monastery is a Benedictine contemplative community of nuns.  The structure and orientation of our life flows from the rule St. Benedict wrote in the 6^th Century.

All over the world the Rule of St. Benedict continues to be followed all these centuries for many reasons.  One is that St. Benedict gathered information, the tried and true praxis of monks prior to him.  He discerned the information and practices that lead one deeper into the way of God.  He presents a way of life that is balanced, challenging and adaptable to varied circumstances.  All of these have not only made it possible for his Rule to survive but to be a luxuriant source of spirituality, holiness and diverse forms of religious life.

St. Benedict stresses the way of humility.  Chapter Seven of the Rule is titled: The Steps of Humility.  Even a surface reading of this chapter could not result in thinking Benedict was promoting an obsequious, timid approach to life.  Humility flows out of one’s deep and personal relationship to the Lord.  Trust in the Lord’s care about every hair on one’s head and a forthright self-knowledge go hand in hand.  It is lived out in the monastery concretely in service to one another.  He asks us to go against the prevailing culture and ask ourselves what is better for another in a particular circumstance and choose that rather than what is best for oneself.  Humility in the monastery includes living a life of obedience to the Church, one’s superior and the other members of the community.  It is embracing and living as one’s own all that it entails to be one of the nuns.  This covers the gamut from the schedule, activities, food and even clothing, wearing a habit.

Another keynote in a Benedictine monastery is obedience.  In the very first lines of the Prologue of the Rule St. Benedict calls the out to one he describes as “drifting away” from Christ, to take up “the strong bright weapons of obedience to follow Christ the true King.”   The obedience St. Benedict teaches is not a blind, unthinking reflex.  Rather, it is a response, an answer to a voice one is taught to listen for.  St. Benedict’s insight is to listen, listen with the ear of your heart, for the voice of the Lord.  The bell that is rung to call the community to rise from sleep, to the Church, or the refectory is described as “the voice of the Lord”.  In the words of the superior, is heard the voice of the Lord.  In the request of a member of the community is the voice of the Lord.

A phase from St. Augustine could be used to describe one who embraces St. Benedict’s teaching, “They live with their heads in heaven and feet on the earth.”  This does not mean that Benedictines are air-heads, or people not really living in “the world”.  Rather it means that the life of a Benedictine is lived in such a way that all the activities of daily life have the potential to flame into eternity.  The insight of St. Benedict has to do with where and how we come into contact with Christ.  The monastery is called the “House of God”, the liturgical prayer of the community is called, “the work of God.  He tells us that the Abbot, the superior “is believed to hold the place of Christ”, when a guest comes to the monastery “, one welcomes Christ”, when the sick are served “Christ is served” and one serves “as Christ”.  The tools of the monastery: brooms, shovels, pots, books and all the rest are to be treated as “the vessels of the altar”.  St. Benedict presents the very ground of the monastery as being the surface of the altar table on which one has the potential to live a totally integrated life, no divisions to be wholly given to God.

The community is not made out of carbon copies.  St. Benedict speaks about all the varied characters that will be found in the cloister.  He provides for weak and strong, healthy and ill, old and young, docile and stubborn and on and on.  Each member is treated as unique and therefore challenged as only that single person can be to grow in the way the Lord’s knows.  One of the irreducible elements of a nun’s day is prayer.  Benedictine prayer is lived out in several different ways which are so interlinked that there is no way to list them in a matter of importance, all are essential and flow from the other.  Personal prayer is part of daily horarium.  St. Benedict, wisely, does not teach how, but simply to do it.  As a 20^th Century Benedictine Abbot, Dom John Chapman, wrote, “Pray as you can, not as you can’t.”  Liturgical prayer forms the skeleton of a Benedictine’s day.  The bell gathers the community together seven times throughout the day to sanctify the hours.  Here, commonly, the nuns are saturated in the Word of God through the Psalms and Scripture.  It is the prayer of the Church.  There the needs of the world are gathered before God through the hearts, minds and bodies of the community praying.  Here St. Benedict gives great detail to bring about an ordered, reverent and common prayer to be the heart beat of the monastic day.  Then there is Lectio Divina.  This is the blood of monastic life.  It is the daily immersion of each individual into the reading of the bible.  From the ancient monks and nuns comes the practice of this method of “method-less” reading, reflecting, praying and contemplating the Word of God in the secret of one’s own heart.  All these ways of praying are as necessary and regular as the meals are every day.

Although there are more elements to Benedictine spirituality, this presentation will end with one that St. Benedict made a part of the promises that a monk takes in his monastery: stability.  This notion was not new with him.  The concept was already present in the Desert Fathers when they stressed the importance of “staying in one’s cell” and not fleeing the spiritual combat.  Stability is more than simply staying in one place, it is embracing that place, that people into the cords of one’s own heart.  It could easily be compared to a marriage vow, but not to a single person, but to a community.  It is a beautiful way of life that binds you to the good of the others, living with these “others” united in one goal: seeking God with all one’s being.

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