Preferring Nothing to Christ

SEEK

A senior chosen for his skill in winning souls should be appointed to look after them with careful attention. The concern must be whether the novice truly seeks God and whether he shows eagerness for the Work of God, for obedience and for trials. The novice should be clearly told all the hardships and difficulties that will lead him to God. (The Procedure for Receiving Brothers, Ch 58)

A person can have a desire to enter a monastery for many different reasons. This desire might have grown since childhood; a quiet, insistent voice that won’t go away. Or sometimes this desire can be prompted by a particular set of circumstances; a chance meeting, a retreat, a book, or a person. Many different experiences can lead a person to enter a monastery, but once there ‘the concern is whether or not the person truly seeks God.’

The Benedictine path offers the opportunity to search for God and to follow the deepest longings of our hearts. This search for meaning in life is something which binds all of humanity, whether they express it in formal religion or not.

Seeking God in a monastic context means being open to God in the Scriptures and liturgy, the Rule of St Benedict, the teaching of your Prioress and the example of your sisters. The monastic path is a particular way of shaping your search for God. For the monastic the search is ‘in this place, with these people.’

St Benedict understands the search for God in a monastic context to involve ‘eagerness for the Work of God, for obedience and for trials.’  Do you have any experience of praying the Divine Office? Praying the Office alone isn’t always easy. Is there anything that you have found helpful over the years?

When St Benedict speaks of ‘eagerness for obedience’ how does this strike you? Can you bring to mind experiences in your life where obedience seems straight forward? Can you bring to mind experiences in your life where obedience is a challenge?

‘eagerness for trials’ can seem a rather difficult idea. St Benedict wants to be quite sure that a person is serious about their desire for monastic life. How do you hear St Benedict’s words? How do you respond when trials come? Is there anything that you learnt about yourself during the pandemic?

Reflect on your own search for God. What are your hopes and dreams?

SEEK

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? What, dear brothers, is more delightful than the voice of the Lord calling to us?

Rule of St Benedict, Prologue

For many people their first contact with Benedictine Spirituality is through Esther De Waal’s book, Seeking God. Her title highlights one of the defining characteristics of St Benedict’s Rule. The monastic embarks upon a journey where every action, great or small, is a search for the God who called them into being.

This deep desire to search for God is something which God has planted within each one of us. For St Benedict this search and longing is a response to God who has sought us first. In the Prologue to his Rule, St Benedict uses the imagery of the Lord searching for his workers in the marketplace. I love this imagery.

Sr Aquinata osb comments that the Lord attracts his workers with a question:

I might suppose he asks if someone has good capacities and wants to work hard in his vineyard. So I am surprised at Christ’s question: Who is there who longs for life and desires to see good days? This is very enlightening. God seeks not my achievement, not even my service. No, what God seeks is my person, desiring that I have life, which corresponds to my heart’s desire.

From the outset the Rule of St Benedict is relational. God seeks us out, desiring that we have life. Part of the monastic’s journey is learning to hear that voice and then to take the next step in search of God.

What sense do you have of God having searched for you and called out to you in the market place of your life?

How have you responded?

Photo by Renate Vanaga on Unsplash

Matthew 13:44-52

‘The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field which someone has found; he hides it again, goes off happy, sells everything he owns and buys the field.’

Sr Sandra Schneiders spent twelve years writing a trilogy on Religious Life: Finding the Treasure, Selling All and Buying the Field. The titles alone drew me into her work. It is a meticulous exploration of the values that are explicit and implicit in Religious Life. Making a parable the backdrop for her work is a very engaging strategy. It’s almost impossible to read her work without having your perspective deepened and challenged.

Parables are intended to challenge and disturb us. How we enter and engage with the parable is our choice. While the temptation is often to allegorise, assigning meaning to each element of the story, the real power of the parable is the questions that it raises within us. 

Lurking beneath the details of this story for me are some unanswered questions:

Who owned the treasure?
Are you entitled to something that you find in a field?
If you sell all you have, what do you live on? 

The finding of the treasure and wanting to secure it was all consuming for the person in the parable. This is a once in a life-time discovery. I am left pondering the things in my own life that are all consuming. For who or what would I risk everything?

The kingdom that Jesus offers is of incomparable worth. What might it mean for you to risk everything for the Kingdom?

LISTEN

‘Listen carefully, my son, to the master’s instructions,
and attend to them with the ear of your heart.‘

St Benedict’s words are an invitation to intentional discipleship, an invitation to follow on a path that has been trodden for centuries. Listening with the ear of the heart is no small matter. It can challenge you at your very core. Sr Clare Condon, an Australian Good Samaritan Sister, comments:

To listen with the heart doesn’t come easily. It is a difficult and challenging journey. I need to empty my heart of my own agenda, of all that clutters my life and my survival: to empty my heart of my own assumptions and prejudices; to empty my mind of all the preconceived answers and solutions I might conjure up. This is a place of inner openness to receive the other, the word, whether that be the Word of Scripture, the word of a confrere, the cry of despair, or the hope of forgiveness and reconciliation. That inner openness is what the desert fathers and mothers called “purity of heart”.

Being open to what God has to say doesn’t happen overnight for the monastic. Those first years of formation are an intense time of adapting and sifting of all the things you are hearing. You learn, perhaps for the first time, the particular cadence of your own inner dialogue. You learn to listen for God’s voice in your sisters and your superior. Your day is shaped by the times of communal prayer and there you listen to the voice of the Church at prayer. In the psalmody and the Scriptures you listen to the story of our salvation being told over and over again. Few things are familiar. You become acutely aware of what you hear and how it is said.

St Benedict’s invitation to listen with the ear of the heart is every bit as relevant for you as it is for the monastic.

Look back over your week.
When are you aware of having listened intently?
How did God speak to you?

Will you do anything differently next week?

Today the Church keeps the Memoria of Martha, Mary and Lazarus. It’s a day that holds special significance for Benedictines. There are two collects given for Mass in a supplementary book which is used for all things Benedictine.

Heavenly Father,
your Son was received
as an honoured and welcomed guest
in the home of Bethany,
keep us close to the Master
in our work and prayer,
that, blameless in his sight,
he may welcome us into his kingdom.

Heavenly Father,
your Son called Lazarus from the grave
and sat at table in the house of Bethany.
May we serve him faithfully in our brethren
and with Mary ponder and feed upon his word.

Between these two collects pretty much all the distinctive elements of Benedictine life are covered. Two phrases stand out for me: ‘honoured and welcomed’ and ‘ponder and feed’. If you have read anything about Benedictine Spirituality you will have a sense of the place which hospitality holds. I was struck today that it is more than just welcoming, it is showing a very particular kind of care, a care that reverences Christ in anyone who crosses the threshold. Ideally we take this attitude with us when we leave the monastery. So this honouring and welcoming can take place wherever we are: in the queue in the supermarket, waiting for the lift, crossing the road. The list is endless.

In the second collect I was struck by the coupling of ponder and feed. We are familiar with the idea of pondering on God’s Word, perhaps a little less so with the image of feeding on the Word. St Bernard explores this image in an Advent sermon:

Keep the word of God in the same way as you would preserve bodily food. For the word of God is a living bread and food for the mind. So long as earthly food is stored in a box it can be stolen or nibbled by mice or it can go bad if it is left too long. But if you eat the food you don’t have to worry about any of these.

This is the way to preserve God’s word; Blessed are they who keep it (Lk 11:28) Let it pass into the innards of your soul, then let it make its way into your feelings and into your behaviour. Eat well and your soul will delight in the abundance. Do not forget to eat your bread, lest your heart dry up, but let your soul be filled as with a banquet (Ps 101:5, Ps 62:6) If you thus keep the Word of God, you can be quite sure that it will keep you.

Sometimes the bread of God’s Word can seem dry and hard, sometimes is it light and sweet. Refusing to eat is not an option.

The image of friendship presented in the texts which mention Mary, Mary and Lazarus is not saccharine but real. The daily reality of walking the monastic path is anything but romantic. Sometimes there will be disagreements. This is brought out beautifully in an Anglican collect that I found:

God our Father,
whose Son enjoyed the love of his friends,
Mary, Mary and Lazarus,
in learning, argument and hospitality:
may we so rejoice in your love
that the world may come to know
the depths of your wisdom, the wonder of your compassion,
and your power to bring life out of death.

Sometimes arguments will be part of our path. Strong friendships can take the rough with the smooth. Martha, Mary and Lazarus incarnate for us this real friendship.

Bring to mind the friends who have been part of your journey.
Thank God for these.

LISTEN

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.

It’s pretty hard to beat the opening sentences of the Rule of St Benedict. Like an overture giving the listener a taste of the main musical motifs of a work, St Benedict lays out the key themes in his vision of monastic life.

We begin the Rule with an invitation to be open in every sense of the word. We are invited to open the ear of our hearts and to listen at the very core of our being to St Benedict’s teaching. Every sentence is crafted in love.

St Benedict hopes that his words will find a home in us. He hopes that his vision will so inspire us that we are prompted to action. A stirring in the heart and an action always go together for St Benedict.

At the outset of the monastic journey the most important disposition we can have is one of listening like a disciple.

Use this text for reflection during the next few days:

The Lord has given me a disciple’s tongue. So that I may know how to reply to the wearied he provides me with speech. Each morning he wakes me to hear, to listen like a disciple. (Isaiah 50.4)

How does God speak to you?
What do you hear?

Matthew 20:20-28 

‘The mother of the sons of Zebedee came to Jesus with her sons to make a request of him, and bowed low; and he said to her, ‘What is it you want?’ She said to him, ‘Promise that these two sons of mine may sit one at your right hand and the other at your left in your kingdom.’

Wanting the best for your sons seems the most natural thing in the world. I often wonder what James and John had told their mother about Jesus and what it was really like to follow him. Perhaps they had spared her their growing unease when Jesus spoke of his death and alluded to suffering. She sees the world through the classical lens of thrones and positions of authority. The brothers are beginning to glimpse another reality.

In two-thousand years of Church life we haven’t managed to avoid the language of prestigious appointments and the deference due to the hierarchy. The landscape is complicated and what we expect of our leaders comes into sharper and sharper focus as scandals are revealed. Today’s Gospel gives us a touchstone:

‘Anyone who wants to be great among you must be your servant, and anyone who wants to be first among you must be your slave, just as the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.’

A yearning for servant leadership has been expressed in much of the Synodal process. We can map out what we would most hope for in leadership that images Christ. As I was reflecting on today’s Gospel a line from a hymn kept coming into my mind: ‘Let there be peace on earth, and let it begin with me’. I wonder if I can change ‘peace’ for ‘servant leadership’? Might what I yearn for best begin in my own life? If I long for a Church that is at the service of others, can I see this modelled in my own life?

How is Christ calling you to servant leadership?

I’ll be posting Wednesdays and Saturdays for the next 6 weeks. I have chosen 6 themes from the Rule of St Benedict: Listen, Seek, Gospel, Christ, Love and Together.

(I had hoped to launch this on July 11th, but things got delayed a bit.)

Starts Wed 26th July

Matthew 13:24-43 

In all this Jesus spoke to the crowds in parables; indeed, he would never speak to them except in parables. This was to fulfil the prophecy:

I will speak to you in parables
and expound things hidden since the foundation of the world.

Today the Gospel offers us three parables, three stories that are told to challenge and perhaps disturb us. But do they challenge us? They are so familiar. We think we know what they mean. I am indebted to the work of Jewish New Testament scholar, Amy J Levine, for shaking me out of a bit of biblical complacency. Her work immediately calls into question some of the ideas I have picked up through the years. Her treatment of the parable of the woman who takes some yeast has given me many insights.

‘The kingdom of heaven is like the yeast a woman took and mixed in with three measures of flour till it was leavened all through.’

The first insights come from translation. The yeast that the woman takes is more like a sourdough starter than the fresh or dried yeast that we buy. It has good and bad connotations. Elsewhere in the New Testament we read of ‘good leaven’ and ‘bad leaven’. What the women does with the yeast is another interesting point of translation. The Jerusalem Bible says;

the yeast a woman took and mixed in with three measures of flour

Whereas other translations say ‘hid’. Amy J Levine comments: ‘This hiding, together with images of three measures of flour and of a woman baking should send readers to the scriptures of Israel.’ We are being led here to the story of Sarah in Genesis. When three guests arrive she is asked prepare three measures of flour. This is about forty to sixty pounds of flour.

For our woman in the parable this amount of flour is far too much for one woman to knead, and certainly far too much to eat. It’s a beautifully extravagant image. Levine says;

‘Perhaps the parable speaks of the importance of extravagance and generosity. Perhaps it suggests we adapt our lives in the light of the kingdom and do something that might seem foolish or wasteful to people on the outside. Imagine inviting three strangers to lunch. Imagine setting up a food pantry that stocks more than what one family could eat.‘

The idea that this parable invites us to adapt our lives in light of the Kingdom is something which speaks to me. It feels within my grasp. I can relate to the bread making too. As a novice, with some trepidation, I was taught to bake. I followed the instructions to the letter. But I was soon to learn that there are many variables: age of the yeast, outdoor/indoor temperatures and humidity. It always felt like a small miracle when I put my twenty four loaves to cool.

I love the implicit power that the woman in the parable holds:

‘This woman is doing something cryptically rather than in an upfront manner that can be controlled; she’s going to produce more bread than a single person can eat; she might even be in a position to determine you gets the bread.’

Levine’s final comment on the parable is worth quoting in full:

Perhaps the parable tells us that despite all our images of golden slippers, harps and halos, the kingdom is present at the communal oven of a Galilean village when everyone has enough to eat. It is present, inchoate, in everything, and it is available to all, from the sourdough starter to the rain and the sunshine. It is something that works its way through our lives, and we realise its import only when we don’t have it. To clean out the old leaven allows us to make room for the new, to start again, and again to feast.

How can you be extravagant and generous for the Kingdom this week?

(Short Stories by Jesus: The Enigmatic Parables of a Controversial Rabbi, Amy J Levine)

John 20:1-2,11-18

I recently read an article about Pope Francis where the writer talked about the importance of understanding his style of leadership, way of speaking and particular vocabulary. What stands out for me when I think of Pope Francis is his stress on the culture of encounter. Pope Francis wants us to meet people where they are, not where we would like them to be.

It’s possible to see the whole of our salvation history through the prism of encounter. In our biblical imaginations we hold the images of Adam and Eve who are afraid of that encounter and hide themselves, Abraham who encounters God as he looks at the stars of the night, Sarah who listens at the opening of the tent and hears God’s promise for her, and so many more. Each encounter involves a person taking one step nearer to the God who holds the promise of all Life.

Mary Magdalene too must take that one step closer to Jesus. Making her way to the tomb in darkness, she’s drawn by the power of every moment of encounter that she has ever had with Jesus. It might well have been as dawn was breaking that Jesus meets her. He takes the initiative. Then she must respond too.

I am always struck by the very human nature of this encounter. Jesus says her name and in that moment Mary is returned to herself. There are no angels or flashes of light, just one person recognising another. Raymond Brown sees in this moment an echo of the Good Shepherd in John 10:

‘She is one of those of whom Jesus said “I know my sheep and mine know me.” ‘

There are many ways for us to come to faith. Mary Magdalene shows us the way of encounter.

Imagine Jesus calling you by name. How do you respond?