The Liturgical Season of Lent is behind us. The huge
reality, though the liturgical colors have changed, is that we are yet, in so
many ways we are not accustomed to, still living a Lent such as none of us have
ever experienced.
It was my intention, going into the Liturgical Season of
Lent, to back up from things in order to focus more intently upon my own Lenten
journey. Little did I know, little did any of us know, that our Lenten journeys
would include the personal realities associated with this virus that has direly
affected the entire global community. In backing up, while some areas were put
on hold, other areas came into play that required personal attention and energies.
Personally, I think we need times like these.
Times like these come along to test our faith. They come
along to show us where our trust and confidence are placed. They come along to
show us where our personal values are. They come along to show us that we are
indeed, fractured and divided by opinions and languages though we are, one
humanity.
None of us will ever be the same on the other side of
this pandemic.
Some of us will grow and bear fruit in the deeper
realities to be garnered during these difficult times. Some of us [probably
most of us] will return again to wholeheartedly chasing after the self-satisfying
and ego-inflating things of the world.[1]
Our lives, one way or the other, will continue to promulgate the contents and
conditions that rule our hearts.
I think it is rather appropriate how, in picking up where
I left off at the beginning of Lent and considering all the uncertainties that
are ahead of us where this Covid-19 is concerned, the Rule of Saint Benedict
speaks to these times and offers guidance as to how to approach life as it
unfolds on the backside of the pandemic. The Rule is timeless. Its principles
are as valid in the 21st Century as they were in the 6th
Century and every Century between.
Saint Benedict tells his students …
To listen
willingly to holy reading.
To apply one's
self often to prayer.
To confess
one's past sins to God daily in prayer with sighs and tears, and to amend them
for the future.
Not to fulfil the desires of the flesh
(cf Gal 5:16).
To hate one's own will.[2]
Many of the monks in Saint Benedict’s day came from impoverished
backgrounds. Many of them were illiterate and ignorant. These depended upon “hearing”
not only the Holy Scriptures read to them but also the Rule of Saint Benedict
and the writings of the Fathers.[3]
Unlike in Benedict’s day, a great deal of the ignorance of these modern
times is not because of illiteracy. A few in our modern western culture are
illiterate but not many. The ignorance is because people choose to follow the
tunes of modern pipers piping tunes that are pleasing to modern enculturated
tastes; tunes that ignore the historical testimonies and interpretations of those
closest to the Source.
The farther we go this side of those historical testimonies and
interpretations, the more convoluted and outrageous the heresies become. The
onus, then, is on us to examine every modern interpretation in the light of the
old lest we fall prey and become captives of modern well-disguised heresies.
You would think that Benedict’s monks prayed enough considering they prayed
all the offices, including Vigils. Yet, here we find Benedict telling his students
to pray even more.
Benedict was careful to delineate between a prescribed community prayer
life and a spontaneous personal prayer life; all of which holds the potential
to produce the fruit of contemplation in the lives of those who yield themselves
to their cultivation where, in the cultivation, we are “carried away by God
into his own realm, his own mystery, and his own freedom. It is a pure and
virginal knowledge, poor in concepts, poorer still in reasoning, but able, by
its very poverty and purity, to follow the Word wherever he may go.”[4]
Is this not where the deepest desires in the very depths of our deepest
heart of hearts desires to go? Is this not the purest direction in seeking God?
If this is not our motive for seeking God, is not our motive for seeking him
askew and in need of correction?
Saint Benedict tells me to never acquire and develop a cavalier and
nonchalant attitude about sin and my own sinful nature. He insists that I never
cease to sorrowfully remember my own personal sinful participation in the
reason why Christ suffered the brutality of the Cross.
I cannot look upon the image of Christ on the Cross without experiencing
an overwhelming sense of appreciation and gratitude for the sacrifice that he
made of himself - in part because of me and my own actual sins. Here, in gazing
upon the Crucified Christ, I most deeply realize what I can of the unfathomable
love of God for me. How can I ever look upon the Crucified Christ without
thinking of the words of the Psalmist where he wrote, “For I know my transgressions,
and my sin is ever before me.”[5]
Though I have confessed those sins, though I been reconciled and
received Absolution, yet, I do not forget the terrible price that Christ paid
to redeem me from the penalty of those sins. In recollection of them I am
continually reminded of the necessity of living in a way now that makes
amendment for the harm I have done to myself and, more importantly, to others
in the past. Space is made for humility to flourish.
Saint Benedict reminds me that I am to be continually on guard against yielding
to the desires of the flesh that lead to doing the works of the flesh … immorality,
impurity, licentiousness, idolatry, sorcery, enmity, strife, jealousy, anger,
selfishness, dissension, party spirit, envy, drunkenness, carousing, and the
like.[6]
Why such a prohibition?
Then, in verse 60, Saint Benedict tells his students to hate the urgings
of their will that beg them to consider or think about returning to those patterns
of sinful behavior that will lead them to perdition.
Early on in the Prologue of the Rule, Saint Benedict mentions taking
these seeds of temptation to task and foiling “the evil one, the devil, at
every turn, flinging both him and his promptings far from the sight of his
heart. While these temptations were still young, he caught hold of them and
dashed them against Christ.[9]
Pray for one another. PAX
David
[1] 1
John 2:16
[2]
Holy Rule 4:55-60
[3]
Holy Rule 73
[4]
Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation, © 1961, p.5
[5]
Psalm 51:3
[6]
Galatians 5:19-21
[7] Galatians
5:21
[8] Douay-Rheims
translates Galatians 5:19-21 - [19] Now the works of the flesh are manifest,
which are fornication, uncleanness, immodesty, luxury, [20] Idolatry,
witchcrafts, enmities, contentions, emulations, wraths, quarrels, dissensions,
sects,
[21] Envies, murders, drunkenness, revellings, and such
like. Of the which I foretell you, as I have foretold to you, that they who do
such things shall not obtain the kingdom of God.
[9] Holy
Rule Prologue 28
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