BENEDICT'S TWO ASSUMPTIONS

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This past Wednesday I gave a talk on the spirituality of Saint Benedict. It proved to be a good exercise for me as a monk, since it gave me the opportunity to reexamine my own commitment to my vocation as a Benedictine. But it also reminded me that monastic spirituality is at its base simply the spirituality of the gospel that every Christian is called to live in his or her own state in life. 

Like any Christian, the monk's main task is “to seek God.”  And at the heart of the monk’s search according to the Rule of Benedict is a pair of assumptions: First, that God is everywhere, and second, that Christ is to be found in every person.

GOD IS EVERYWHERE

St. Benedict probably got his sense of the holiness and the wholeness of the universe from living in the mountains of Italy. He sees that the hills are filled with the glory of their creator. They are, therefore, sacred. He sees himself surrounded by the presence of God in hills, thorn bushes, ravens and rainstorms. Then he takes this vision and expands it to include all of creation: everything in our daily human existence is holy, even the tools of the monastery, which Benedict demands should be treated with the same reverence as vessels of the altar. Distinctions between the “spiritual” and the “material,” then, make no sense, whether you’re talking of trees or ax handles, mountains or cooking pots.

This blurring of any distinction between what is “holy” and what is “earthly” comes across in the way the various jobs in the monastery are described. The abbot, for example, who is the spiritual head and teacher of the monastery, also has the down-to-earth tasks of making sure the bell gets rung on time, assigning the daily work to the brethren and keeping an inventory of the monastery’s tools and clothing. The cellarer, on the other hand, who has the very practical charge of distributing to the monks all the various material necessities, is to do so with the same compassion and concern for everyone’s spiritual well-being as the abbot: he should be “like a father to the whole community.”  “If any brother happens to make an unreasonable demand of him, he should not reject him with disdain and cause him distress, but reasonably and humble deny the improper request.” This monk who is in charge of the store room “must show every care and concern for the sick, children, guests, and the poor, knowing for certain that he will be held accountable for all of them on the day of judgement.”  

If jobs in the monastery aren’t divided into purely “spiritual” and “secular,” neither are the activities of the monk’s day. You bring your meditation to the way you work, your holy reading to the way you treat your brothers and sisters, your tears to your praying, and so on. In Benedict’s vision, praying, working, feeling, and thinking are all woven together into a seamless fabric. They are all part of the one most important task, the single-minded search for God.

This principle underlies every Christian's view of the world, everyone's spirituality: "I do not lead two lives, one "spiritual" (religion, prayer) and the other "secular" (meaning "real life" -- e.g.  food shopping, paying bills, driving the kids to soccer practice). We each lead only one life, not two. Our path to heaven is precisely through our everyday actions as we faithfully live out our vocation or vocations as parent, spouse, employee, friend, and so on.

CHRIST IS FOUND IN EVERY PERSON

Benedict is very explicit about this principle: Christ is to be encountered especially in the young, the sick, guests, and pilgrims: "for it is in them that Christ is especially received." Notice that the particular examples he gives -- people that often make demands on us at inconvenient hours or in inconvenient ways. Jesus may show up in the person of a difficult student who is acting out his frustrations in my class, or as a stranger at the front door of the monastery asking to talk to a priest.

The Jesus that I encounter may come as a beautiful first-grader with the face of a little angel. But He is just as likely to show up as the Suffering Christ dragging his cross up Mount Calvary. This second face of Jesus is obviously much less pleasant, much more difficult to deal with, but there He is, standing in front of me.

"Who would Jesus hate?"

In the past several years this second of Benedict's great principles "Jesus is present in every person in the world" has been abandoned in favor of a principle that says "Christ is found in people who look like me, who speak like me, and who meet my criteria of acceptability." This convenient principle means that I have no obligation toward "the Others" who are less fortunate than me, who live under political oppression or who are starving to death. We can justify ignoring the plight of these fellow humans  on the basis of any of a number of principles. But the Gospel, and Saint Benedict won't stop reminding us of that Great Principle, "Jesus is present in every person."

Put that on your bumper sticker.