Browsing tag: rule of st benedict

  • Father and Mother: Titles Worth Wearing

    To be worthy of the task of governing a monastery, the abbot must always remember what his title signifies (Rule of St. Benedict, 2.1)

    Father and mother today need guts just to assert that their titles signify anything. These are words under attack, and the linguistic debates are just the tip of the social iceberg. What would in the past have been a yawning tautology today provokes a frisson of risk: a father is a man, and a mother is a woman. But beyond linguistic debates, St. Benedict brings in the concept of worthiness, and that has to do with behavior. A man who begets a child had a consequent responsibility to behave as a father to that child. A woman who conceives a child has the ensuing duty to behave as a mother to the child. Marriage is a partnership between a man and a woman who render each other into father and mother and together serve as parents to the children they engender. These statements are merely observations of phenomena recognized by all human societies—with cultural variations—since the dawn of civilization.

    What the Church adds in is a concept of the sacrament of matrimony in which the marriage of a man and a woman becomes a sign of the relationship between Christ and the Church. In this sign, the husband figures Christ, and the wife figures the Church (Mark 10: 6-9; Catechism of the Catholic Church II.3.7). It’s clear that a Christian understanding of the human being includes a dynamic between male and female that goes all the way back to Adam and Eve. But the harmony of masculinity with maleness and of femininity with femaleness has only recently needed defending. For two thousand years, the Church, for all her struggles, never had to prove the essential maleness and femaleness of humanity. 

    However, the Church in all times and places has taken a stand for the essential humanity of human beings. Human beings are not merely matter and form, but also souls. We’re not just biological machines enmeshed in sociological parameters. We are eternal persons made in the image of God. And God knows individuals. Far from flattening personalities and erasing differences, the Holy Spirit fulfills and brings to completion the design of God in each person—not despite but within the bodies he gives us. Both G.K.Chesterton in Orthodoxy and C.S.Lewis in The Screwtape Letterswrite eloquently about the individuation of Christians. This is why we don’t have to rebel against our bodies in order to be free. We are free to be ourselves already. But we are each called to take up our cross daily and head uphill. And sometimes it’s our own bodies that make us suffer.

    We don’t reject pronouns or representatives because we ourselves are representatives of Christ on earth. As redeemer of the world, Christ is the Pronoun, the part of speech that stands in for another. This is why Christians do not reject the power of “him” to represent us. To reject “him” would be to reject the whole concept of redemption, the atoning sacrifice who stands in for us before the holy God. 

    All this is to say that worthiness is something we give ourselves to, the effort we make each day. But worth is something given to us, something that an atheist culture does not have the right to take away. We know that we are worth the self-sacrifice of God. Therefore each day we make an effort to be worthy, to embody in our circumscribed, imperfect persons the divine character qualities of Christ.

    So be boldly and bodily the man or woman God bids you to be. Your choices will light the way for people who are groping for their souls.

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  • The Call

    Let us get up then, at long last, for the Scriptures rouse us when they say: “It is high time for us to arise from sleep” Romans 13:11 (Rule of St. Benedict, Prologue.8)

     

    I myself had an experience of a call involving Scripture and a stirring up from physical sleep, on a particular occasion.  At about 2 a.m., the morning of June 19, 2012, I woke up with the urgent sense that I should post verses of Scripture online.  

    So I thought, “I’ll do it tomorrow.”

    But the urgency increased.  I felt that I must check the readings for the day–not in the Upper Room guide to prayer that I’d been using for twenty-two years, but in the Catholic Missal app, which I had downloaded on my phone at some point but had never even opened before.  I fumbled with my phone in the middle of the night and read the Scriptures that showed up: 1 Kings 21: 17-29 (the Lord sends Elijah to confront Ahab). Psalm 51 (“…in the greatness of your compassion wipe out my offense….). Matthew 5: 43-48 (“love your enemies“).  There was also a daily Bible verse, Acts 17:30-31:

     

    God has overlooked the times of ignorance, but now he demands that all people everywhere repent, because he has established a day on which he will judge the world with justice through a man he has appointed, and he has provided confirmation for all by raising him from the dead.

     

    There was a “share” button to post this verse on Facebook.  It was imperative that I must do so at once.  I signed in to my rarely-used Facebook account, and I posted the verse.

    This experience had never happened to me before.  It hasn’t occurred again since.  Afterwards, trying to come to terms with it, I explained to God that this was the wrong message, entrusted to the wrong person, at the wrong cultural moment.

    These days, God is not supposed to “demand” anything.  God should be grateful if anyone condescends to consider that he might exist.  And if God did want to get a message out to all people everywhere, my Facebook (or Substack) page is not the place to do it.  Furthermore, people these days don’t repent.  A few Catholics make a practice of going to Reconciliation, but the people who do most of the sinning aren’t interested in repentance at all.  

    There must have been some mistake.  The angel tapped the wrong person.  I don’t have the credentials, the platform, the authority or the influence.

    Years later, I still find it difficult to view my contributions as tilting the scales toward good, against evil. Even to mention such an eventuality strikes me as comical rather than inspiring. It’s easier for me to perceive in others the spiritual stupor that is the perfectly normal condition of nice people who imagine that evil is always necessarily someone else’s problem. There is a clear difference between the sort of people who make an attempt—any attempt—to engage at whatever level is available to them, and, on the other hand, the people whose lives seem to be devoted to various ways of escaping. If the spiritual battle has to do with this fundamental difference in stance, then I do prefer to resemble the former type rather than the latter. But in a society where spectating rather than participating is the default path, and where any sort of action makes you the fumbling, ridiculous spectacle, resolving to be an agent in your own environment at a small level—because smallness is risible—is peculiarly daunting.

    But St. Benedict provides some insight into personal calls from God:  Seeking his workman in a multitude of people, the Lord calls out to him and lifts his voice again: “Is there anyone here who yearns for life and desires to see good days?” Psalm 34:12 (Rule of St. Benedict, Prologue.14-15)

     

    There’s a promise here, and it’s not just pie in the sky bye ‘n bye.  The promise of God for those who will heed him is a good life beginning here and now.

    The Lord waits for us daily to translate into action, as we should, his holy teachings.  Therefore our life span has been lengthened by way of a truce, that we may amend our misdeeds.  As the Apostle says, “Do you not know that the patience of God is leading you to repent?” Romans 2:4 (RB Prologue.35-37)

    If we are each called to translate Christ’s teachings into daily action, how do we operate within a culture that has explicitly rejected Christ and that organizes itself along opposing principles?

    Therefore we intend to establish a school for the Lord’s service.  In drawing up its regulations, we hope to set down nothing harsh, nothing burdensome.  The good of all concerned, however, may prompt us to a little strictness in order to amend faults and to safeguard love. (RB Prologue.45-48)

     

    Every household with children is a school: the question is, into whose service are the children being formed?  If the home is spiritual chaos, the child may emerge into adulthood unfit for any good purpose.  Spiritual discipline costs effort every day, and sometimes it is at odds with the various activities that the world equates with success.  But to overlook spiritual discipline costs far more. You pay the price in illness, loneliness, and despair, and your decisions as a parent also play out in the lives of your children. It’s easier to perceive these trajectories in other people’s lives than in my own, but my own life is the only one I can live.

    Rather than raging at evil in others elsewhere, let us combat it where we are.  The battle for good against evil will be won or lost behind closed doors, without recognition or applause, but the consequences will yield a harvest for good or ill in the lives of those we care about.

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  • The Challenge

    This message of mine is for you, then, if you are ready to give up your own will, once and for all, and armed with the strong and noble weapons of obedience to do battle for the true King, Christ the Lord. (Rule of Saint Benedict. Prologue.3)

    St. Benedict is not the first to describe the Christian life as a spiritual battle. St. Paul talks about the armor and weapon of the Christian in his letter to the Ephesians.  It might seem a bit histrionic, though, for me to characterize life in domesticity as a spiritual battle. For that matter, the use of military language to describe the spiritual life of Christians has been generally out of favor for a long time. But there is a point where a struggle deserves to be called a fight.

    I certainly felt that a spiritual enemy was prevailing when my fourteen-year-old came home from Catholic high school and told me that her classmate’s sister had committed suicide. The classmate found her sister’s body, hanging by the neck in her closet. In a bid for comfort, the classmate decided to have sex with her boyfriend. Then he dumped her. Then she left the school. The bleakness and wrongness of that series of events does demand some response, some mobilization of effort, some marshalling of troops, so to speak.

    Transferring my daughter to a different Catholic high school yielded better academics and more resources, but no escape from brutality. There a sixteen-year-old shared publicly that her boyfriend sent her to the emergency room with a perforated vagina. The parents of the boyfriend see no evil, hear no evil, where their progeny is concerned. Nothing is wrong, and no one is bad. This indifference too strikes me as a spiritual rout, a defeat not merely at an individual level, although it’s individuals who sustain the wounds. If nice people are loveless, are they Catholic?

    You can say the Lord’s Prayer over and over, “Thy will be done,” but a call to “obedience” is a socially risky teaching to espouse. It sounds strange, in a culture where we’re constantly being told to break all boundaries, emancipate ourselves, be free, and so on. Obeying the revealed commands of God is hard enough if you accept, say, the Ten Commandments. Obeying the teachings of the Catholic Church may seem so wildly incompatible with survival that it doesn’t even bear considering. But if you’re going to live at all, you’ll be taking actions along certain principles, whether you’ve thought about them yourself or are just doing what everyone else seems to be doing. In fact, you will be following someone or something, whether or not you call it obedience.

     

    The call to follow Christ is a call to obey a Person. Christians are supposed to be able to know what Christ wants through the indwelling of the Holy Spirit. The accumulated revelation of the Church over two millennia is supposed to help us individually understand how to live this life. But whether we understand how or not, we’re still here and doing something. It would be helpful to have some templates that correspond to situations that ordinary people face today. Can you call this obedience to God? I hope so.

    Outline

     

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  • The Motivation

    Listen carefully, my son, to the master’s instructions, and attend to them with the ear of your heart. This is advice from a father who loves you; welcome it, and faithfully put it into practice. (Rule of St. Benedict, Prologue.1)

    When I first thought of writing a domestic rule, the idea was completely sarcastic. In the culture that surrounds me, there are no two things so disdained as domesticity and regulation. But it irked me that out of twenty centuries of Church history, nobody had ever written a rule for married people raising children. It irked me so much that gradually I came to entertain more seriously the idea of writing one myself.  The question is not what the Christian life should look like in its mature state. There are innumerable resources to tell us that. The question is how to raise infants from formless chaos to that mature state, and how to survive the process.

    I feel sure that the things I’ve learned as an ordinary Christian wife and mother have been learned before by many women who were not able to record their experiences in writing.  For many centuries, only a tiny fraction of the population could read, much less write. Writing materials were too expensive to waste on merely personal reflections. So, written documents tended not to contain mundane details.  Even when education and materials became more widely available, how many mothers had the leisure to write anything more than a personal letter to a specific child at a specific moment? They were too tired all the time, and nobody ever asked.

    Out of all the famous leaders of any denomination, only John Wesley, to my knowledge ever asked his mother, Susanna Wesley, to write down her thoughts on raising children.  The only way to account for such a gaping hole in Christian teaching is to acknowledge that the Church for most of its existence has taken for granted that ordinary people would perform the tasks of child-rearing as a matter of course. Nobody ever wrote a domestic rule because nobody ever imagined a society without families.

    Then the twentieth century came along and gave the world atheist experiments in total annihilation of the family. Western countries resisted totalitarian ideologies only to yield to decomposing forces that have dissolved all the primary bonds. Mothers kill their children and call it freedom. Brothers and sisters train to compete against each other, not to love each other. The bond between father and son has become a fight for dominance.

    These existential topics were on my mind, but I hesitated to take on the extra work involved in doing this project.  I started putting pen to paper only after hearing of four healthy people who suddenly died, within a week or so of each other. There was a family friend who went in for surgery and died on the operating table. A business contact dropped dead of a heart attack while working out in the gym. A seventeen year-old shot himself “accidentally.” A woman bled to death giving birth to her fourth baby. It occurred to me that I might not have much time left myself. Before I go, I want to record some parenting advice for my own children as they raise families.

    What follows is not a polemical essay but a personal testimony.  What I myself have learned in the course of struggling to live an ordinary Christian life as that deplorable relic, a housewife, I now proclaim to you. I write so that you may live joyful lives. And I hope that I can spare you many heartaches and miseries by carefully and honestly parsing out the elemental details that are so often taken for granted.  Anything objectionable in what follows I have carefully considered and have decided to include anyway, as an alternative to something worse that I fear more.

    A rule is not a set of laws to obey. A rule is a pattern, a multi-faceted template, to which one can turn when it’s not clear what to do next. The goal is not to be domestic nor to be regulated, but to live a Christian life—even in domesticity. How does one raise children in happy homes that everyone is not always trying to escape from? As my own template I’m taking the Rule of Saint Benedict. Of all the choices I’ve made, this is one of the few that seemed, quite simply, obvious.

     

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