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II

THE INVITATION

‘Let us set out on this way, with the Gospel for our guide.’

‘Now is the hour for us to rise from sleep . . . let us open our eyes . . . let us hear with attentive ears . . . run while you have the light of life.’ That urgent call to awake, to listen, to take action, was addressed to the sixth-century monks of Monte Cassino, the monastic community established by St Benedict in the Apennine hills of central Italy. The phrase is taken from the Rule, that brief working document which in no more than nine thousand words sets out the aims and practice of the monastic life as St Benedict presented it. It is clearly set out, divided into seventy-three chapters, which look in turn at all the essentials of worship, work, study, hospitality, authority, possessions demanded by a life lived out in community following the three Benedictine vows of obedience, stability and conversatio morum. Fifteen hundred years on it has lost nothing of its freshness or immediacy. It speaks to all of us. Right at the very start of that Prologue its approach is wide open: ‘Whoever you may be . . . he that has ears to hear.’ A variety of images comes tumbling out as in his excitement St Benedict addresses his listeners at one moment as recruits for the army, and the next as workmen in God’s workshop, then as pilgrims on the road, then as disciples at school. Each of us is to hear the call in different ways; it will strike one chord in one person and another in the next. But one thing we all share in common. The message is to be heard now, we must rouse ourselves, shake ourselves out of our apathy. The Rule questions the assumptions by which we live and looks at some of the most basic questions that we must all face. How do we grow and fulfil our true selves? Where can we find healing and grow into wholeness? How do we relate to those around us? to the physical world? to God? If we think of all the alienations that we must resolve – those alienations that we find in the story of Genesis and of the fall – from one another, from the natural environment, from God himself – the alienations within ourselves remain the starting point. So the familiar words of the western world, which can be heard all the time in conferences and consultations, in sermons and discussions, are also the theme words of the Rule: roots, belonging, community, fulfilment, sharing, space, listening, silence. The sense that men and women need to love and be loved if they are to become fully human; that they need a place in which to belong, and that not merely in a geographical sense; that they need freedom and yet they must accept authority. The Rule knows much about the continuing paradox that all of us need to be both in the market-place and yet in the desert; that if we join in common worship yet we have also to be able to pray alone; that if commitment to stability is vital so also is openness to change. There is no evasion here of the complexity of life, and yet the final paradox is that running the way to God appears modest and manageable while at the same time it is total. These are the demands of extreme simplicity which cost everything.

All of us need help if we are to face up to the realities demanded of us if we are to make our way to God as whole and full people. There is nothing unfamiliar in that appeal of the Prologue, nothing new. It is ancient wisdom and yet it is contemporary. It is an appeal to the divine spark in everyone, never totally extinguished but in need of rekindling. In an age of extreme complexity men and women look for vision even more desperately, since without vision there is no hope. That is why the Rule of St Benedict speaks to all of us – it answers a deep need.

The connotations of restriction, restraint, control, even of bureaucracy, which the word ‘rule’ carries with it today do not, however, encourage most of us to look very warmly on such a guide, such an approach. Even St Benedict’s modest claim that it is no more than ‘a little rule for beginners’ does not reassure us. Yet the Rule of St Benedict is neither rule-book nor code. It does not dictate; it points a way. It is a piece of creative writing which combines a firm grasp of essentials with a confident flexibility about their practical application. For the past fifteen centuries men and women living out the Benedictine monastic life have come back to it as the spring and source of their personal renewal and their community reform, finding it still relevant, apposite, inspiring. So too those of us on the outside of the monastic enclosure, in whatever walk of life, if we let it speak to us will also find that it answers our needs with its immediate, practical, vivid wisdom.

Nowhere does St Benedict suggest that he is interested in encouraging unusual people to perform spectacular feats. His monks are ordinary people and he will lead them in ways that are accessible to ordinary people. In fact the importance of the weak and the ordinary is one of the great guiding principles of the Rule, one which ‘makes it possible for ordinary folk to live lives of quite extraordinary value,’ as Cardinal Basil Hume puts it. Time and again the Rule makes allowances for human weakness. ‘In drawing up its regulations we hope to set down nothing harsh, nothing burdensome’ (Prol. 46). The essence of the Benedictine approach is distilled in a small phrase of Thomas Merton’s, written in 1945 right at the start of his monastic life in the Cistercian abbey of Gethsemani in Kentucky when he wrote of ‘that concern with doing ordinary things quietly and perfectly for the glory of God which is the beauty of the pure Benedictine life.’

Perhaps on the first reading much of the Rule might appear rather prosaic, with chapters on such mundane affairs as food and sleep and clothing, the duties of porter or cellarer or server. It is indeed mundane, of the world, and all the more important for that reason. But then on re-reading it, what had seemed rather dry becomes vibrant and vital because in exploring the Rule we find that this is a description of day-to-day living which revolves around Christ, both individually and corporately. For essentially the intention is to heighten an awareness of Christ himself, that Christ who has seen us in the crowd and called out to us, and who is at once the start of our journey and also the goal. ‘Seeking his workman in a multitude of people, the Lord calls out to him and lifts up his voice again: Is there anyone here who yearns for life and desires to see good days? (Psalm 33 (34): 13). If you hear this and your answer is “I do” . . . See how the Lord in his love shows us the way of life’ (Prol. 14–16, 20). And that way is essentially our own highly individualistic way. Chapter 40, which deals with a most practical matter, the measure of drink, opens with a quotation from 1 Corinthians: ‘Each man has his special gift from God, one of one kind, another of another.’ This really says something very important about the Rule. It is offering a basis on which each individual is to grow and develop. St Benedict was not concerned to stifle the spirit with over-legislating. He was far more interested in educating the individual to recognize the need of the moment and to respond to it appropriately than in laying down clear-cut directives for every conceivable contingency. This is of course the secret of its power. Dom David Knowles, himself a Benedictine, wrote of this with characteristic warmth and simplicity.

No one seriously coming at Christian perfection can go to the Rule for help and come away feeling that he read advice suitable only for a particular call or a particular stage of the religious life. Each finds there what he seeks. The Rule has something of the divine impersonality, without limitations and yet intensely individual, of the Gospel teaching; nor should this surprise us, for the Rule is the Gospel teaching.

‘Let us set out on this way, with the Gospel for our guide’ (Prol. 21). Right from the start, when the Prologue declares, ‘the Scriptures rouse us when they say, “It is high time for us to arise from sleep” ’, we find that the primary concern of the Rule is to confront us as forcefully as possible with the Gospel and all its demands. The Word of God is directly addressing the reader or the listener. For St Benedict is himself a man grasped by the Word of the Lord, a man who listens himself and so calls for listening in others. If we listen we have the chance of the gift of relationship in Christ; if we fail to listen we throw away that chance. Two vivid images are used in the Prologue to describe the Word and to show the role it is to play in our lives. It is ‘the light that comes from God’ (9) and then ‘the voice from heaven’ that calls out its challenge. That challenge is a phrase from the invitatory psalm 95 (94) used each day at the office: ‘If you hear his voice today do not harden your hearts’ (8). It would be difficult to think of anything more urgent, more immediately rooted in the here and now of this moment in time, in today and not in tomorrow or yesterday. Here is an analogy between the daily rising from sleep to hear the words of Scripture and the taking up of the religious life in general as a rising from sleep. A light to waken and a voice to rouse: the Word must be heard, it demands response! At the very end of the Rule, in chapter 73, St Benedict picks up this point again equally firmly, in a tone of voice that brooks no excuses. It is Scripture itself which has the divine authority, which is ‘the truest of guides for human life’. So in some ways the whole of the Rule might be thought of as an inclusion, a commentary, a practical working out of this central theme of the primacy of the Word. The Rule is simply an aid for us to live by the Scriptures. Almost every page of the Rule carries either a direct quotation from the Bible or reflects some biblical allusion. The New Testament is used slightly more often than the Old, and altogether there are probably well over three hundred references. It remains almost impossible to come to a certain estimate for the simple reason that even if the Rule is not using a direct quotation it is so thoroughly soaked in the language and the imagery of the Bible that much of the writing has a biblical flavour, and carries a biblical resonance.

What the members of a Benedictine community sought from the Word was not knowledge but strength, whereas we in the twentieth century have reversed those priorities. This makes it easy to question whether St Benedict is not rather naïve in his use of Scripture, whether what he does with the Old Testament is justified or not. To read the Rule in such an academic way is to prevent ourselves from experiencing its full power. St Benedict’s essential aim was to make Scripture a living experience for his community with all the means at his disposal. ‘Holy Scripture cries aloud!’ is how he opens chapter 7. We are continually confronted with God speaking. There is no escape.

When he wrote the Rule the Bible was essentially a book that was heard rather than read. Since most monasteries and convents had only a limited number of books, and since in any case most reading would take place during the saying of the offices, and even private reading would involve reading to oneself in a muted voice, comparable to reading a poem aloud quietly for full effect, Scripture became a message spoken this day to this disciple. But it was not simply the reading technique that was responsible. The ‘cry’ of Scripture is perceived as the voice, the call of God. When the call is heard it must be embraced as a personal message with its living demands addressed to each individual. God’s Word is not something static, past and dead; something lying inert between the covers of a book. It is what it is called: the manifestation of a living person whom one recognizes by the tone of voice. The call is not simply something out of a distant past; it comes today and it comes to elicit a response from us and to engage us in dialogue. In an age of beguiling paperbacks offering attractive ways to God through every conceivable means, the Rule stands firm in its relentless demand that we listen to the Word, that we never fail to remember that the Word remains our point of reference. Its aim, which the Prologue shows so clearly, is to establish a life that can be lived after the Gospel, and that for St Benedict means, above anything else, a life that is earthed in Christ. Christ is the beginning and the end of the Rule, as he is the beginning and end of our lives. In the Prologue St Benedict says, ‘This message of mine is for you, then, if you are ready to give up your own will, once and for all, and armed with the strong and noble weapons of obedience to do battle for the true King, Christ the Lord’ (3). And at the very end he asks, ‘Are you hastening toward your heavenly home? Then with Christ’s help, keep this little rule that we have written for beginners’ (73, 8–9).

Yet in calling them beginners he does not insult his readers by treating them as children, by patronizing them, by protecting them from those demands which will draw out of themselves depths and strengths of which perhaps they were unaware. It will not be impossibly tough but it will without doubt be tough. His Rule certainly looks on his disciples as ‘sons’ but they are also ‘workmen’ and ‘soldiers’. He shows compassion for the weak but he challenges the strong. He is gentle with weakness but he sees straight through subtle self-deceit and evasion. The demands will not be too great and they will be tempered to each, though for some that is going to mean a ladder which leads to the ultimate in self-dispossession. There is humanity here but there is nothing tepid.

The Rule must become the environment in which the disciple has to live, to struggle, to suffer. This is not therefore a legal code set out by a lawgiver. It is the fruit of practical experience, and although it contains certain theological principles it is derived essentially from life itself and sets out to be a guide to Christian living in the practical situations of daily life. What follows from this, as the most recent edition of the text points out, is that the wisdom of many of its provisions cannot be appreciated until they have been lived. Those today who follow it in a monastic community are doing that week by week and year by year. For those of us outside the enclosure the experience, and therefore the depth of understanding and appreciation, can only be very much less. It would be presumptuous on our part to find facile parallels, and to think that living without the vows can be in any way comparable to living the life of total commitment. Yet if our starting-point is the same, if we can say with the novice that we are truly seeking God, then we may turn to St Benedict as our guide on the way, not so much to pick and to choose whatever might seem relevant or attractive to us in our particular situation, but rather to draw inspiration from a great saint and one of the great creative writers of all time. Because his Rule was a means and never an end, because it is always pointing beyond itself, St Benedict would doubtless have rejoiced to find readers who are ready to learn from him, to go back to the Scriptures and to put nothing before the service of Christ.