Читать книгу Listen My Son - Dwight Longenecker - Страница 13

Listen my son to the instructions of your Master, turn the ear of your heart to the advice of a loving father; accept it willingly and carry it out vigorously; so that through the toil of obedience you may return to him from whom you have separated by the sloth of disobedience.

To you, then, whoever you may be, are my words addressed, who, by the renunciation of your own will, are taking up the strong and glorious weapons of obedience in order to do battle in the service of the Lord Christ, the true King.

First of all, whenever you begin any good work, you must ask of God with the most urgent prayer that it may be brought to completion by him, so that he, who has now deigned to reckon us in the number of his sons, may not later on be made sad by our wicked actions. For we must at all times use the good gifts he has placed in us, so that he will not later on disinherit us as an angry father disinherits his sons; nor like a feared lord, who has been roused to anger by our sins, hand over to eternal punishment us wicked slaves for refusing to follow him to glory.

From the first words of the Rule, Benedict speaks to us as a loving father and calls us into a relationship with our heavenly Father. The theme of fatherhood runs through Benedict's whole Rule, for the abbot is the father of the monastic community. As such he stands in the place of Christ, and in Benedict's day theologians spoke much of Christ as the ‘father’ of the new humanity. Like the abbot, the cellarer too is called to be ‘a father to the whole community’. So Benedict sees the monastic community as a loving Christian family, and his Rule can be read as an invaluable guide for the Christian family even today.

As our loving father in God Benedict calls us first of all to engage our will, so we may set off on the path of holiness. The main obstacle to our spiritual progress is inertia, or sloth. Sloth is not just slovenly laziness. Instead it is a state of mind which is unable to take spiritual action. It is a spiritual torpor, disinterestedness and complacency. Benedict makes clear that this spiritual condition is a deadly downward spiral. Such inertia is caused by disobedience and causes further disobedience.

If disobedience is the cause of spiritual torpor, then obedience is the remedy (cf. Bar. 4.28). So Benedict rouses us with a new call to take up ‘the strong and glorious weapons of obedience in order to do battle in the service of the Lord Christ’. It is unfashionable in an age of relativistic individualism to call for obedience, but the gospel has always called individuals to submit their will to God's (Matt. 6.10). Benedict calls us to engage our will, but he also encourages us because it is God who is at work in us bringing his will to completion in us (Phil. 2.12–13).

This call to obedience is one of the three foundation stones of the Benedictine life. The Rule opens by calling us to attention with the word ‘listen’ and it is no coincidence that the root of the word ‘obey’ is ‘to hear or listen’. So the kind of obedience called for is not the childish, mindless obedience of the military drone, but an obedience which first attentively seeks to understand. So we are to ‘turn the ear of [our] heart to the advice of a loving father’.

As Christian fathers we rightly expect obedience from our children (Eph. 6.1). The fool expects mindless obedience by virtue of force. But the loving father – like Benedict himself – nurtures an open-hearted, attentive and intelligent obedience in which the will is fully engaged and attracted by love.