The Rule of Benedict Read online

  The meat of four-footed animals was not part of the monastic diet because it was thought to heighten the animal facet of human nature. In a society whose philosophy was highly dualistic and whose world separated out neatly into things that were of the spirit and things that were of the flesh, the consideration was a serious one. Monastic life was about higher things and nothing was to be allowed to interfere with that.

  The question for the modern world has seldom been what effect diet has on spirit—though interest in the field is certainly growing—but we have come to some conclusions about other things. We do know that colors, weather, light, environment all affect the spirit. Too much of anything, we have discovered, can weigh us down. Each of us needs to fast from something to bring ourselves to the summit of our spiritual powers. The question is, Have we lost a sense of the value of fasting or do we simply fill ourselves, glut ourselves, without limit, without end, with the useless and the disturbing?

  CHAPTER 40

  THE PROPER AMOUNT OF DRINK

  March 19 – July 19 – Nov. 18

  “Everyone has personal gifts from God, one this and another that” (1 Cor. 7:7). It is, therefore, with some uneasiness that we specify the amount of food and drink for others. However, with due regard for the infirmities of the sick, we believe that a half bottle of wine a day is sufficient for each. But those to whom God gives the strength to abstain must know that they will earn their own reward.

  The Rule of Benedict does not pretend to know the sacrifices that each of us needs to make in life. A tale from the Sufi may explain why, in the face of multiple spiritual disciplines, all of which specify many and sundry exercises as basic to the spiritual life, Benedict avoids this road of defined penances. “How shall we ever change,” the disciples asked, “if we have no goals?” And the master said, “Change that is real is change that is not willed. Face reality and unwilled change will happen.”

  It is so easy to make cosmetic changes in the name of religion. It is so easy to make up rules and keep them so that we can feel good about doing something measurable in the spiritual life. We can fast and fast and fast from food or drink and nothing changes because fasting from food is not what we really need at that moment to turn our hearts of stone to hearts of flesh. We can kneel and kneel and kneel but nothing changes because kneeling is not what we need to soften our souls just then. We can fast and kneel and tithe and nothing changes because we do not really want anything to change.

  Growth is not an accident. Growth is a process. We have to want to grow. We have to will to move away the stones that entomb us in ourselves. We have to work at uprooting the weeds that are smothering good growth in ourselves. Benedict doesn’t tell us how much to eat. He simply provides the food and trusts us to make a choice to discipline ourselves somehow, some way, so that we do not sink into a mire of self-satisfaction so thick that there is no rescue for our sated souls.

  The abbot or prioress will determine when local conditions, work, or the summer heat indicates the need for a greater amount. They must, in any case, take great care lest excess or drunkenness creep in. We read that monastics should not drink wine at all, but since the monastics of our day cannot be convinced of this, let us at least agree to drink moderately, and not to the point of excess, for “wine makes even the wise go astray” (Sir. 19:2).

  The Rule of Benedict devotes itself more to the virtue of moderation than it does to the anesthetizing of the soul that can come with mortification. To forgo a thing completely is to prepare to forget it. If I never eat another piece of chocolate, I may forget all about chocolate, but I may also soon substitute something even more dangerous for its taste: drugs, consumerism, a hardened selfishness. To do something commonly but to do it in right proportion, on the other hand, is to win the struggle with it every day. To have one handful of salted peanuts, one piece of chocolate, one glass of wine in the midst of plenty, one car in a culture that counts its wealth in two-car garages, now that is mortification! Benedict knows that culture dictates the use of many things in life. What he cares about is that we control them rather than allowing them to control us.

  However, where local circumstances dictate an amount much less than what is stipulated above, or even none at all, those who live there should bless God and not grumble. Above all else we admonish them to refrain from grumbling.

  If Benedictine spirituality understands anything about life at all, it understands the corrosive effects of constant complaining. Complaining is the acid that shrivels our own souls and the soul of the community around us as well. Complaining is what shapes our mental set. Feelings, psychology tells us, do not affect thoughts. Thoughts affect feelings. What we allow ourselves to think is what we are really allowing ourselves to feel. When we learn how to correct our thought processes, then we learn not only how to stabilize our own emotions but how to change the environment around us at the same time. What we see as negative we make negative and feel negative about. What we are willing to think about in a positive way becomes positive.

  Complaining, in other words, undermines the hope of a community and smothers possibility in a group. The whiner, the constant critic, the armchair complainer make an office, a family, a department, a community a polluted place to be. What we accept wholeheartedly that fails, we can always correct. What we condemn to failure before we have ever really tried to accept it, is not corrected; it is doomed to an untimely and, more than likely, an unnecessary death.

  Benedictine spirituality tells us to open our hearts and our minds to let grace come in from unlikely places, without preplanning and prejudgments. “When there is no desire,” the Tao Te Ching instructs, “all things are at peace.”

  CHAPTER 41

  THE TIMES FOR MEALS

  March 20 – July 20 – Nov. 19

  From Easter to Pentecost, the monastics eat at noon and take supper in the evening. Beginning with Pentecost and continuing throughout the summer, the members fast until midafternoon on Wednesday and Friday, unless they are working in the fields or the summer heat is oppressive.

  On the other days they eat dinner at noon. Indeed, the abbot or prioress may decide that they should continue to eat dinner at noon every day if they have work in the fields or if the summer heat remains extreme. Similarly, they should so regulate and arrange all matters that souls may be saved and the members may go about their activities without justifiable grumbling.

  The Rule of Benedict divides the year’s meal schedules into four parts. From Easter to Pentecost there are no fast days, and the meals are taken at noon and before sundown. After Pentecost, Wednesdays and Fridays are fast days, as they were for all Christians of the period, and the meal, probably the only meal of the day, was to be delayed, the Rule mandates, until about three o’clock. But the law is no sooner made until Benedictine spirituality raises its fresh and liberating head again and softens the prescription with “unless.” Unless it would be too hard to do. Unless they are too tired to wait. Unless the day is too hot to add one more difficulty to it. Then, the abbot or prioress and only the abbot or prioress may decide to mitigate the rule, to change the law, to allow the relaxation. And that is the issue. It is the abbot or prioress who decides what the change will be, not the individual monastic. Life, in other words, is not of our own choosing. The vagaries of life are not under our control. Circumstances change things and real spirituality demands that we be prepared at all times to accept them with faith and hope.

  It isn’t that Benedictine spirituality is meant to be lax; it is that it is meant to be sensible and it is meant to be serene. What is the use of making up difficulties when all we really have to do in life is to learn to bear well what must, under any circumstances, be borne?

  From the thirteenth of September to the beginning of Lent, they always take their meal in midafternoon. Finally, from the beginning of Lent to Easter, they eat toward evening. Let Vespers be celebrated early enough so that there is no need for a lamp while eating, and that everything can be finished by daylight.
Indeed, at all times let supper or the hour of the fast day meal be so scheduled that everything can be done by daylight.

  The third period of the year, from September 13 to Ash Wednesday, was the period known as “the monastic Lent.” Here, Benedictine spirituality called for a measure above and beyond the norm. To do simply what was required was not enough. Benedictine spirituality called for extra effort in the development of the spiritual life. It is an interesting insertion in a rule that otherwise seems to be based on exceptions, mitigation, differences, basic Christian practice, and the law of averages.

  Indeed, Benedictine spirituality is clearly rooted in living ordinary life with extraordinary awareness and commitment, a characteristic, in fact, that is common to monasticism both East and West. As the Zen masters teach, “One day a new disciple came up to the master Joshu. ‘I have just entered the brotherhood,’ the disciple said, ‘and I am anxious to learn the first principle of Zen. Will you please teach it to me?’ he asked. So Joshu said, ‘Have you eaten your supper?’ And the novice answered, ‘Yes, I have eaten.’ So Joshu said, ‘Then now wash your bowl.’”

  The first principle of Benedictinism, too, is to do what must be done with special care and special zeal so that doing it can change our consciousness and carve our souls into the kind of beauty that comes from simple things. It is so easy to go through life looking feverishly for special ways to find God when God is most of all to be found in doing common things with uncommon conscientiousness.

  CHAPTER 42

  SILENCE AFTER COMPLINE

  March 21 – July 21 – Nov. 20

  Monastics should diligently cultivate silence at all times, but especially at night. Accordingly, this will always be the arrangement whether for fast days or for ordinary days. When there are two meals, all will sit together immediately after rising from supper. Someone should read from the Conferences or the Lives of the early church writers or at any rate something else that will benefit the hearers, but not the Heptateuch or the books of Kings, because it will not be good for those of weak understanding to hear these writings at that hour; they should be read at other times.

  On fast days there is to be a short interval between Vespers and the reading of the Conferences, as we have indicated. Then let four or five pages be read, or as many as time permits. This reading period will allow for all to come together, in case any were engaged in assigned tasks. When all have assembled, they should pray Compline; and on leaving Compline, no one will be permitted to speak further. If monastics are found to transgress this rule of silence, they must be subjected to severe punishment, except on occasions when guests require attention or the prioress or abbot wishes to give someone a command, but even this is to be done with the utmost seriousness and proper restraint.

  Silence has two functions. The first effect of exterior silence is to develop a sense of interior peace. The second value of silence is that it provides the stillness that enables the ear of the heart to hear the God who is “not in the whirlwind.”

  The constantly blaring iPods, the slammed door, the ceaseless, empty chatter in the hall, the constantly harsh voice all break the peace of the heart and agitate the soul. Day after day, month after month of them thickens the walls of the mind until it becomes impossible to hear the talk within us that shows us our pain and opens our mind to the truths of life and the presence of God.

  Silence is not enough, however. Benedict wants night to rest our spirits as well as our bodies. He wants to send us to bed with instruction on the gentle Word of God, not on the scriptural history narratives with their blood and struggles, so that the stresses of the day can be softened by the thoughts of something beyond them.

  We live with noise pollution now and find silence a great burden, a frightening possibility. Muzak fills our elevators and earbuds wire us to MP3 files and TVs blare from every room in the house from morning till night. We say we do not have the time to think, but what we actually lack is the quiet to think. Yet, until we are able to have at least a little silence every day, both outside and in, both inside and out, we have no hope of coming to know either God or ourselves very well.

  CHAPTER 43

  TARDINESS AT THE OPUS DEI OR AT TABLE

  March 22 – July 22 – Nov. 21

  On hearing the signal for an hour of the Divine Office, monastics will immediately set aside what they have in hand and go with utmost speed, yet with gravity and without giving occasion for frivolity. Indeed, nothing is to be preferred to the Opus Dei.

  If at Vigils monastics come after the doxology of Psalm 95, which we wish, therefore, to be said quite deliberately and slowly, they are not to stand in their regular place in choir. They must take the last place of all, or one set apart by the prioress or abbot for such offenders, that they may be seen by them and by all, until they do penance by public satisfaction at the end of the Opus Dei. We have decided, therefore, that they ought to stand either in the last place or apart from the others so that the attention they attract will shame them into amending. Should they remain outside the oratory, there may be those who would return to bed and sleep, or, worse yet, settle down outside and engage in idle talk, thereby “giving occasion to the Evil One” (Eph. 4:27; 1 Tim. 5:14). They should come inside so that they will not lose everything and may amend in the future.

  At the day hours the same rule applies to those who come after the opening verse and the doxology of the first psalm following it: they are to stand in the last place. Until they have made satisfaction, they are not to presume to join the choir of those praying the psalms, unless perhaps the prioress or abbot pardons them and grants an exception. Even in this case, the one at fault is still bound to satisfaction.

  Benedictine spirituality does not ask for great feats of physical asceticism, but it does require commitment to community and a sincere seeking of God through prayer. Tardiness is not to be tolerated. Indolence is not to be overlooked. Halfheartedness will not be condoned. Benedict does not want people sleeping in or dawdling along or “preferring anything to the Opus Dei,” the work of God. Nothing in life qualifies as an exchange for the Word of God, not good work, not a job almost finished, not an interesting conversation, not the need for privacy.

  Benedictine life centers around the chapel, and chapel must never be overlooked. What is being asked for in monastic spirituality is a life of fidelity to prayer and to the praying communities of which we are a part. Prayer is a community act in Benedictine life. It is at community prayer, in the midst of others, that we are most reminded that we are not a world unto ourselves.

  Benedict will go so far as to have the community pray the opening psalm slowly to give the slow a chance to get there in an age without alarm clocks, but he will not allow such a lack of personal spiritual discipline to grow. Tardiness, the attempt to cut corners on everything in life, denies the soul the full experience of anything.

  It is a lesson to be relearned in a modern age perhaps. There is nothing more important in our own list of important things to do in life than to stop at regular times, in regular ways to remember what life is really about, where it came from, why we have it, what we are to do with it, and for whom we are to live it. No matter how tired we are or how busy we are or how impossible we think it is to do it, Benedictine spirituality says, Stop. Now. A spiritual life without a regular prayer life and an integrated community consciousness is pure illusion.

  March 23 – July 23 – Nov. 22

  But, if monastics do not come to table before the verse so that all may say the verse and pray and sit down at table together, and if this failure happens through their own negligence or fault, they should be reproved up to the second time. If they still do not amend, let them not be permitted to share the common table, but take their meals alone, separated from the company of all. Their portion of wine should be taken away until there is satisfaction and amendment. Anyone not present for the verse said after meals is to be treated in the same manner.

  No one is to presume to eat or drink before or
after the time appointed. Moreover, if anyone is offered something by the prioress or abbot and refuses it, then, if the monastic later wants what was refused or anything else, that one should receive nothing at all until appropriate amends have been made.

  In a world of fast food drive-in restaurants, multiple family schedules, and three-car garages, the family meal has taken a decided second place in the spiritual and social formation of the culture. In Benedictine spirituality, however, the sacramental value of a meal is that the human concern we promise daily at the altar is demonstrated in the dining room where we prepare and serve and clean up after one another. The Rule is at least as firm on presence at meals at it is about presence at prayer. No one is to be late. No one is to eat before or after meals, or on her own, or on the run because monastic spirituality doesn’t revolve around food, either having it or not having it. Monastic spirituality revolves around becoming a contributing part of a people of faith, living with them, learning with them, bearing their burdens, sharing their lives. The meal becomes the sanctifying center that reminds us, day in and day out, that unless we go on building the community around us, participating in it and bearing its burdens, then the words family and humanity become a sham, no matter how good our work at the office, no matter how important our work in the world around us.

  The Sufi tell a story. To a group of disciples whose hearts were set on a pilgrimage, the elder said, “Take this bitter gourd along. Make sure you dip it into all the holy rivers and bring it into all the holy shrines.” When the disciples returned, the bitter gourd was cooked and served. “Strange,” said the elder slyly after they had tasted it, “the holy water and the shrines have failed to sweeten it.” All the prayer in the world, Benedict knows, is fruitless and futile if it does not translate into a life of human community made richer and sweeter by the efforts of us all. Both community and prayer, therefore, are essential elements of Benedictine spirituality, and we may not neglect either.