As a result of my posting asking for new ideas and fresh blood, I received an e-mail this morning expressing a need for more spiritual content and for me to expand on the Benedictine theme.
I therefore begin this posting with the first three words in Latin of the prologue of the immortal Rule of St Benedict.
Listen, O my son, to the precepts of thy master, and incline the ear of thy heart, and cheerfully receive and faithfully execute the admonitions of thy loving Father, that by the toil of obedience thou mayest return to him from whom by the sloth of disobedience thou hast gone away.
To thee, therefore, my speech is now directed, who, giving up thine own will, takest up the strong and most excellent arms of obedience, to do battle for Christ the Lord, the true King.
In the first place, beg of him by most earnest prayer, that he perfect whatever good thou dost begin, in order that he who hath been pleased to count us in the number of his children, need never be grieved at our evil deeds. For we ought at all times so to serve Him with the good things which he hath given us, that he may not, like an angry father, disinherit his children, nor, like a dread lord, enraged at our evil deeds, hand us over to everlasting punishment as most wicked servants, who would not follow him to glory.
Many of us who are not monks or even oblates will find find great inspiration in a loose reading of the Rule, capable of understanding such notions as analogy, allegory and poetry.
I stayed for just over six months at the Benedictine Abbey of Notre Dame de Triors in southern France from the end of 1996 until July 1997. It is a daughter house of Fontgombault, which was founded in an old reacquired abbey in 1948 by the Abbey of Solesmes. Those abbeys have anything from thirty to sixty choir monks and lay brothers, and new houses have been founded, including Clear Creek in the United States. Their Gregorian chant is sublime and the liturgy is very traditional and in Latin. I was not a postulant, but simply an unchurched deacon, a working guest.
As I studied the Rule with the Abbot, in order to understand monastic life better and for it to influence my own spiritual life, I was struck and continue to be haunted by Dom Delatte’s commentary on the Rule of Saint Benedict:
“The absence of distractions and diversion entirely delivers us to our suffering. The suffering of contemplatives is like Purgatory: the fire penetrates to the marrow, to the most intimate fibres; it is like food being cooked slowly, the lid on the pot, the steam transforming the food. All the movements become painful, like a man who has had his skin stripped away…”
It sounds a bit like a man subjected to torture in a totalitarian regime. As the Abbot admitted to me, monastic life is totalitarian and actually corresponds with all the criteria civil society applies to define a cult like the Scientologists or the Mormons. What an indictment!
On the other hand, the Gospel is radical. He who seeks his soul will lose it and he who gives up everything will be rewarded a hundredfold. That is radical Christianity for you! The most difficult thing is letting go and disciplining the imagination. Every day is the same with only the variations of the seasons. Taste for beauty is replaced by silence, obedience and contemplation. I wrote a few years ago – it must have been based on something I read in Thomas Merton:
The dull monotony of monastic life was relieved by the smallest miracles of nature. It is the admiration of a prisoner as he sees a single leaf emerge from its bud beyond the bars of his confinement, and when the first songbird alights on the window ledge.
How was it possible to suffer by the liturgy I had always loved? The length of Matins and Lauds became a heavy burden, as it doubtless does for young novices who enter the cloister. Indeed the sickness of acedia has its devastating effect on the contemplative. This is where a monastic vocation is made or broken. As Dom Delatte had written, the skin is pulled away as the soul is cooked in its own Purgatory. However, something of my own personality and self-love remained, as indeed was intended, for I had never entered the cloister, nor was it intended to me even to consider a monastic vocation.
The downside of the French abbey is also the feeling of dourness, almost a kind of military spirit of soldiers in their barracks. Individuality is stripped away as the monk lives an anticipation of heaven. Perhaps the disembodied soul no longer has any individuality or personality, but simply becomes part of a universal consciousness, absorbed into the essence of God. It is something I often wonder in spite of evidence to suggest that the souls of the deceased continue to be what they were in life except for no longer having a body.
In spite of monastic life being a lifetime of pain and labour, there must be some consolation in it. I was never ready for such a total letting go, and most priests and lay folk do not have the monastic vocation. In Orthodox monasticism, there are several levels of commitment from the Rasophore to the hermit living the most appalling austerities. In the Benedictine monastery, you have the regular oblate, the lay brother, the choir monk and the hermit.
In six months, you can really find out what it is all about, especially with the detachment of someone who will never enter the community. I wrote yesterday about the Sarabite, and St Benedict also wrote about the Gyrovagus, the wandering pique-assiette or parasite who went from house to house. These are hard words which seem to contradict the legitimate levels of religious commitment. St Benedict Joseph Labre was a “fool for God”, probably mentally ill and a vagrant, but yet has been canonised by the Church. Monks have lived in twos and threes, and their life is legitimate, upright and edifying. I have known of a few very small monastic communities, even though the norm at least in the French Congregation is starting a new house with no less than fifteen monks. I think the categories of sarabite and vagrant need to be studied carefully and well understood, so that judgemental fingers are not unjustly pointed.
I think it is possible to live a Benedictine-inspired life without being a monk, living in the world. They have always had secular oblates who don’t live in community or wear the habit. Many things about the monastic way have remained, though I lack their disciplined precision and routine that enables them to assume incredible workloads. The essentials are prayer and work, giving highest priority to the Divine Office and making one’s entire existence into ceaseless prayer. The ideal is simple, and the most difficult to attain!
I think the Benedictine ideal for those who are not monks needs to be developed and made into a source of strength for our life in the wilderness. Like the songbird and the first leaf of spring, we need to treasure every opportunity for doing a Christ-like deed to another person, and therefore justifying our existence as priests or simple Christian believers in a world where secular organisations have taken over philanthropy and charity. The cloister can take many forms. Mine is the sea!
Spiritual growth? I’m hardly a holy man, but there are gems to be found in Thomas Merton, Dom Delatte and Dom Marmion among so many others. Go to the true masters – and give ear, hearken to their wisdom!
The Blue Flower 
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I think this article provides support for the idea that no “calling”, no “vocation”, no “state of life” is able to be embraced properly speaking without a considerable degree of self-insight. It is easy to daydream and have a romanticised notion of anything: married life, monastic or convent life, being an air pilot, fireman, doctor, you name it. Reality, that is, disappointments and ennui, a sense of pointlessness or doubts follow swiftly, and then the vocation becomes to deal with THOSE things without letting depression take hold. The idea of community sounds ideal, until you actually have to live with people; the idea of obedience seems very virtuous and holy until you actually have to follow orders and relinquish self-determination in everything; the idea of chanting the office and being swept along in a sense of connection with a transcendent God sounds sweet until the day you realise there is no confirming answers and there is just routine and repetition. There are parallels in marriage, in everything.
As a youth I felt attracted to my romanticised idea of the Benedictine life, nourished as it was by short visits to monasteries; I even became a postulant for a short time. But I was immature, unrealistic, unsettled, and unready for commitment of any kind, let alone to stability in a remote community. To this day I respect the monastic and religious calling and admire those who commit themselves to it. But it’s not for me and indeed it’s only now that I feel I have anywhere near the necessary self-awareness that would enable me to imitate them in my own situation. Just trying to give effect to loving as a husband and a father is challenge and hard work enough. It’s almost paradoxical. Like Groucho Marx who said that he wouldn’t join any club that would have him as a member, I wonder if the monastic life may be most suitable to, and most manageable by, those who have the insight to realise it is too difficult and not for them!
The Benedictine way is ultimately a means of giving effect to and deepening one’s understanding of personal meaning and of nourishing one’s relationship with the God believed to provide that meaning. I think it can provide a model for adapting into one’s own circumstances. But even monks can lose direction in a flurry of monastic activity and effort. The older – or wiser – one gets, the more one sees the value of quiet and spiritual calm, and the necessity of a kind of Zen, which is attained, curiously, only when does not strive to attain it.
Wow! Thank you for these wonderful reflections. It is uncanny how you and I seem to think along such similar lines!