The Hook That Got Me

My discovery of Saint Benedict and his Rule came on the heels of quite a bulk of time spent studying the Celtic Saints, the lives of the Desert Fathers and Mothers, and eremitical life in Eastern cultures.

The Rule of Saint Benedict is thoroughly Biblical. It is also thoroughly rooted in historical expressions of Christian monasticism. It also happens that, as it was then and as it is now, and, while we are instructed to practice a spirit of ecumenism in keeping with the prescriptions of Vatican II, the Rule of Saint Benedict is thoroughly Catholic.

Other groups have embraced and modified the Rule to satisfy the polemics of their denominational settings.

Regardless of what other groups do or make of the Rule, there is no escaping the Catholicity of the Rule of Saint Benedict. The single greatest evidence of this Catholicity is at Mass in the monasteries. Oblates of Saint Benedict that are not “Catholic” are not to receive the Body and Blood of Christ.

It is not a matter of disrespectfulness toward anyone. 

It is a matter of respect for the Truth who is embodied in the bread and wine on the altar at the consecration. The Catholic Church is duty-bound to safeguard the Truth [and truths] entrusted to her.

I was not a full-blown Catholic when I discovered the Rule of Saint Benedict and the Benedictine monastic charism. I had, in fact, accomplished my Novitiate as an Oblate Novice [2005] and been received as an Oblate at Saint Bernard Abbey [2006] before entering the Catholic Church [2007].

Make no mistake about it. There is nothing easy about walking out of Protestantism and into Catholicism. Those were terribly trying times.  

My [our] transition was a gradual one that began shortly after the turn of the millennium and came to its major point of definition at the Easter Vigil in 2007 where Shirli and I were officially received into the Catholic Church after completing the Rite of Christian Initiation for Adults.

I am convinced that there were Protestant associates that would have preferred that I chose to look at life through the bottom of a bottle of bourbon. That would have been something that they could have rationalized and made some justification for. But to sell out and become Catholic? That is not reasonable to the Protestant mind.

What was the selling point?

What was the hook that got me?

What was it that so thoroughly convinced me to change “church” camps and give myself as an offering to this expression of Christian monasticism that Saint Benedict founded in the 6^th Century?

The answer is a simple one.

There was something that bled through the writings of monks dead and gone. This same something was evidenced between the written lines of living monks and a few other living Catholic writers. This something was vastly evidenced in the lives of the monks that I met at the abbey when I first visited Saint Bernard Abbey.

This something that hooked me was [and remains] a deep and irrefutable sense of interior peace and joy that comes only through a life of prayer where the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist is always the central focus.