The Rule of Benedict

by Joan Chittister

  Finally, as far as Benedict is concerned, the spiritual life depends on our being peaceful peacemakers.

  Agitation drives out consciousness of God. When we’re driven by agitation, consumed by fretting, we become immersed in our own agenda, and it is always exaggerated. We get caught up in things that, in the final analysis, simply don’t count, in things that pass away, in things that are concerned with living comfortably rather than with living well. We go to pieces over crying children and broken machines and the length of stoplights at intersections. We lose touch with the center of things.

  At the same time, a kind of passive tranquility is not the aim of Benedictine life. The call of this spirituality is to be gentle ourselves and to bring nonviolence in our wake. It is an amazing position for a sixth-century document to take in a violent world. There is no Armageddon theology here, no call to a pitched battle between good and evil in a world that subscribed to dualism and divided life into things of the spirit and things of the flesh.

  In this rule of life, violence is simply discounted. Violence doesn’t work. Not political violence, not social violence, not physical violence, not even the violence that we do to ourselves in the name of religion. Wars haven’t worked. Classism hasn’t worked. Fanaticism hasn’t worked. Benedictinism, on the other hand, simply does not have as its goal either to beat the body down or to vanquish the world. Benedictinism simply sets out to gentle a universe riddled with violence by being a peaceful voice for peace in a world that thinks that everything—international relations, child rearing, economic development, even everything in the spiritual life—is accomplished by force.

  Benedictinism is a call to live in the world not only without weapons raised against the other but also by doing good. The passage implies clearly that those who make God’s creation their enemy simply do not “deserve to see the Holy One.”

  It is a strong passage clothed in words long dulled by repetition.

  Jan. 4 – May 5 – Sept. 4

  If we wish to dwell in God’s tent, we will never arrive unless we run there by doing good deeds. But let us ask with the prophet: “Who will dwell in your tent, O God; who will find rest upon your holy mountain?” (Ps. 15:1). After this question, then, let us listen well to what God says in reply, for we are shown the way to God’s tent. “Those who walk without blemish and are just in all dealings; who speak truth from the heart and have not practiced deceit; who have not wronged another in any way, not listened to slanders against a neighbor” (Ps. 15:2–3). They have foiled the evil one at every turn, flinging both the devil and these wicked promptings far from sight. While these temptations were still “young, the just caught hold of them and dashed them against Christ” (Ps. 15:4, 137:9). These people reverence God, and do not become elated over their good deeds; they judge it is God’s strength, not their own, that brings about the good in them. “They praise” (Ps. 15:4) the Holy One working in them, and say with the prophet: “Not to us, O God, not to us give the glory, but to your name alone” (Ps. 115:1).

  Two themes emerge very strongly here. In case the meaning of the earlier paragraphs has escaped us, Benedict repeats them.

  Justice, honesty, and compassion are the marks of those who dwell with God in life, he insists. Then he reminds us again that we are not able to achieve God’s grace without God’s help. If we do good for the poor, it is because God has given us the courage to do good. If we speak truth in the face of lies, it is because God has given us a taste for the truth. If we uphold the rights of women and men alike, it is because God has given us eyes to see the wonders of all creation. We are not a power unto ourselves.

  The two ideas may seem innocent enough today, but at the time at which Benedict wrote them they would both have had great social impact.

  In the first place, physical asceticism had become the mark of the truly holy. The Fathers and Mothers of the Desert, living a spirituality that was the dominant form of religious life prior to the emergence of communal monasticism, had been known and revered for the frugality, discipline, and asceticism of their lives. They lived in the desert as solitaries. They ate little. They prayed night and day. They deprived their bodies to enrich their souls. They struggled against the temptations of the flesh and fled the world. Theirs was a privatized version of religious development not unlike those theologies that still thrive on measuring personal penances and using religion as personal massage rather than on making the world look the way God would want it to look. Benedict, then, introduces very early in the Rule the notion of responsibility for the human community as the benchmark of those who “dwell in God’s tent,” know God on earth, live on a higher plane than the mass of humanity around them. The really holy, the ones who touch God, Benedict maintains, are those who live well with those around them. They are just, they are upright, they are kind. The ecology of humankind is safe with them.

  In the second place, Benedict puts to rest the position of the wandering monk Pelagius, who taught in the fifth century that human beings were inherently good and capable of achieving God’s great presence on the strength of their own merits. Benedict wants “good deeds” but he does not want pride. We do what we do in life, even holy things, the Prologue teaches, not because we are so good but because God is so good and enables us to rise above the misery of ourselves. Even the spiritual life can become an arrogant trap if we do not realize that the spiritual life is not a game that is won by the development of spiritual skills. The spiritual life is simply the God-life already at work in us.

  An obligation to human community and a dependence on God, then, become the cornerstones of Benedictine life.

  Jan. 5 – May 6 – Sept. 5

  In just this way Paul the apostle refused to take credit for the power of his preaching. He declared: “By God’s grace I am what I am” (1 Cor. 15:10). And again Paul said: “They who boast should make their boast in God” (2 Cor. 10:17). That is why it is said in the Gospel: “Whoever hears these words of mine and does them is like a wise person who built a house upon rock; the floods came and the winds blew and beat against the house, but it did not fall: it was founded on rock” (Matt. 7:24–25).

  Clearly, for Benedict, God is not something to be achieved; God is a presence to be responded to but to whom without that presence we cannot respond. God isn’t something for which spiritual athletes compete or someone that secret spiritual formulas expose. God is the breath we breathe. It is thanks to God that we have any idea of God at all. God is not a mathematical formula that we discover by dint of our superior intelligence or our moral valor. God is the reason that we can reach God. It is to this ever-present Presence that the Rule of Benedict directs us. It is to God already in our lives that Benedict turns our minds. The Hasidim tell the story of the preacher who preached over and over, “Put God into your life; put God into your life.” But the holy rabbi of the village said, “Our task is not to put God into our lives. God is already there. Our task is simply to realize that.”

  The words of the Rule are as fresh on this point as the day they were written. The fact is that we still compartmentalize God. We tell ourselves that we are working on reaching the spiritual life by saying prayers and doing penances and making pilgrimages and giving things up. And we keep score: so many daily Masses, so many rosaries, so many fast days, so many spiritual books read, so many conferences attended equal so many steps toward the acquisition of God. The Rule of Benedict sets us straight. God is with us, for the taking, but not for any spiritual payment, only for realizing what we already have.

  God is neither cajoled nor captured, the Rule makes plain. God is in the here and now in Benedictine spirituality. It is we who are not. It is we who are trapped in the past, angry at what formed us, or fixated on a future that is free from pain or totally under our control. But God is in our present, waiting for us there.

  With this conclusion, God waits for us daily to translate into action, as we should, these holy teachings. Therefore our life span has been lengthened by way of a truce, that we m
ay amend our misdeeds. As the apostle says: “Do you not know that the patience of God is leading you to repent?” (Rom. 2:4). And indeed God assures us in love: “I do not wish the death of sinners, but that they turn back to me and live” (Ezek. 33:11).

  “Life is only lent to us,” a Jewish proverb instructs, and the Rule of Benedict explains further “by way of a truce.” Long life, in other words, is given for the gift of insight: to give us time to understand life and to profit from its lessons and to learn from its failures and to use its moments well and make sense out of its chaos. That, perhaps, is why we expect the elderly to be wise. That, perhaps, is why we look back over the years of our own lives and wonder what happened to the person we were before we began to see more than ourselves. The problem is that there is a lot of life that dulls the senses. Too much money can make us poor. Too much food can make us slow. Too much partying can make us dull. Only the spiritual life enervates the senses completely. All life takes on a new dimension once we begin to see it as spiritual people. The bad does not destroy us and the good gives us new breath because we are always aware that everything is more than it is. The family is not just a routine relationship; it is our sanctification. Work is not just a job; it is our exercise in miracle making. Prayer is not just quiet time; it is an invitation to grow. We begin to find God where we could not see God before, not as a panacea or an anesthetic, not as a cheap release from the problems of life, but as another measure of life’s meaning for us.

  Clearly, living life well is the nature of repentance. To begin to see life as life should be and to live it that way ourselves is to enable creation to go on creating in us.

  Jan. 6 – May 7 – Sept. 6

  Now that we have asked God who will dwell in the holy tent, we have heard the instruction for dwelling in it, but only if we fulfill the obligations of those who live there. We must, then, prepare our hearts and bodies for the battle of holy obedience to God’s instructions. What is not possible to us by nature, let us ask the Holy One to supply by the help of grace. If we wish to reach eternal life, even as we avoid the torments of hell, then—while there is still time, while we are in this body and have time to accomplish all these things by the light of life—we must run and do now what will profit us forever.

  There is a poignancy in this paragraph that is little associated with great spiritual documents. First, Benedict stresses again that we are not alone in our undertaking to live above the dregs of life. What is “not possible to us by nature,” we must “beg for by grace,” he says. This is an enterprise between two spirits, in other words, God’s and our own. We will fail often, but God will not fail us and we must not stop.

  “God,” the elder said, “is closer to sinners than to saints.”

  “But how can that be?” the eager disciple asked.

  And the elder explained, “God in heaven holds each person by a string. When we sin, we cut the string. Then God ties it up again, making a knot—bringing the sinner a little closer. Again and again sins cut the string—and with each knot God keeps drawing the sinner closer and closer.”

  Even our weaknesses take us to God if we let them.

  It is a very liberating thought: we are not capable of what we are about to do but we are not doing it alone and we are not doing it without purpose. God is with us, holding us up so that the reign of God may be made plain in us and become hope to others. If we can become peacemakers, if we can control our need to control, if we can distinguish between our wants and our needs, then anybody can.

  Jan. 7 – May 8 – Sept. 7

  Therefore we intend to establish a school for God’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. Do not be daunted immediately by fear and run away from the road that leads to salvation. It is bound to be narrow at the outset. But as we progress in this way of life and in faith, we shall run on the path of God’s commandments, our hearts overflowing with the inexpressible delight of love. Never swerving from God’s instructions, then, but faithfully observing God’s teaching in the monastery until death, we shall through patience share in the sufferings of Christ that we may deserve also to share in the eternal presence. Amen.

  The spiritual life is not something that is gotten for the wishing or assumed by affectation. The spiritual life takes discipline. It is something to be learned, to be internalized. It’s not a set of daily exercises; it’s a way of life, an attitude of mind, an orientation of soul. And it is gotten by being schooled until no rules are necessary.

  Among the ancients there is a story told that confirms this insight to this day:

  “What action shall I perform to attain God?” the disciple asked the elder.

  “If you wish to attain God,” the elder said, “there are two things you must know. The first is that all efforts to attain God are of no avail.”

  “And the second?” the disciple insisted.

  “The second is that you must act as if you did not know the first,” the elder said.

  Clearly, great pursuers of the spiritual life know that the secret of the spiritual life is to live it until it becomes real.

  The difference between Benedict and other spiritual masters of his time lay in the fact that Benedict believed that the spiritual life was not an exercise in spiritual gymnastics. It was to be nothing “harsh or burdensome.” And it was not a private process. It was to be done in community with others. It was to be a “school” dedicated to “the good of all concerned.” It was to be lived with “patience.”

  The private preserves of the spiritual life are far from dead, however. It is so much easier to go to daily Mass and feel good about it than it is to serve soup at a soup kitchen. It is so much more comfortable to say bedtime prayers than it is to speak peace in a warring world. It is so much more satisfying to contribute to the building of a new church than it is to advocate fair trade over free trade. It is so much more heroic to fast than it is to be patient with a noisy neighbor. It is so much easier to give the handshake of peace in church than it is to speak gently in the family. And yet one without the other is surely fraud if life with God in community is truly of the essence of real spiritual growth.

  The messages of the Prologue are clear: life is very short. To get the most out of it, we must begin to attend to its spiritual dimensions without which life is only half lived. Holiness is in the now, but we go through life only half conscious of it, asleep or intent on being someplace other than where we are. We need to open our eyes and see things as they exist around us: what is valuable and what is not, what enriches and what does not, what is of God and what is not. It may be the neighborhood we live in rather than the neighborhood we want that will really make human beings out of us. It may be the job we have rather than the position we are selling our souls to get that will finally liberate us from ourselves. It may be what we do rather than the prayers we pray that will finally be the measure of our sanctity.

  God is calling us to more than the material level of life and God is waiting to bring us to it. All we have to do is to live well with others and live totally in God. All we have to do is to learn to listen to the voice of God in life. And we have to do it heart, soul, and body. The spiritual life demands all of us.

  CHAPTER 1

  THE KINDS OF MONASTICS

  Jan. 8 – May 9 – Sept. 8

  There are clearly four kinds of monastics. First, there are the cenobites, that is to say, those who belong to a monastery, where they serve under a rule and an abbot or prioress.

  In this chapter, Benedict describes each of the four main classes of religious life that were common at the time of his writing. The effects of the descriptions and definitions are apparent. He is for all intents and purposes telling us the characteristics that he values most in spiritual development and emphasizing the qualities that in his opinion are most important to spiritual growth.

  In on
e brief sentence, then, Benedict describes the life of the cenobite. Cenobites are the seekers of the spiritual life who live in a monastery—live with others—and are not a law unto themselves. Holiness, he argues, is not something that happens in a vacuum. It has something to do with the way we live our community lives and our family lives and our public lives as well as the way we say our prayers. The life-needs of other people affect the life of the truly spiritual person and they hear the voice of God in that.

  Cenobites, too, live “under a rule.” Meaningless spiritual exercises may not be a Benedictine trait but arbitrariness or whim are not part of Benedict’s prescription for holiness either. Monastic spirituality depends on direction. It is a rule of life. Self-control, purpose, and discipline give aim to what might otherwise deteriorate into a kind of pseudoreligious life meant more for public show than for personal growth. It is so comforting to multiply the practices of the church in our life and so inconvenient to have to meet the responsibilities of the communities in which we live.

  But the spiritual life is not a taste for spiritual consolations. The spiritual life is a commitment to faith where we would prefer certainty. It depends on readiness. It demands constancy. It flourishes in awareness.

  The ancients say that once upon a time a disciple asked the elder, “Holy One, is there anything I can do to make myself enlightened?”