Browsing tag: rule of st benedict

  • Be A Good Model

    Therefore, the abbot must never teach or decree or command anything that would deviate from the Lord’s instructions (Rule of St. Benedict 2.4)

    Neither should parents. Maybe you fail to hit the bull’s eye, but at least you aim for the target. Your children will imitate whatever they see you do. This means that if your son sees you aiming for the bull’s eye, he’ll aim too. And sometimes he turns out to be a much better shot than you are. But you’re the one who points the way. Parents are role models for their children.

    Then at last the sheep that have rebelled against his care will be punished by the overwhelming power of death (RB 2.10).

    No! Not eternal death! As a parent, you’re responsible to turn away from the hot door with the smoke seeping around it. Don’t imagine that your children wouldn’t follow you through it. You no longer have the option to ruin only your own life. Even if there’s not always an exit marked FUN, your job is to find one marked POSSIBLE.  Sometimes it opens on a deep, daunting stairwell with many steps. But in this passageway are extraordinary people with far worse injuries than yours who still have the courage to go on. Follow them.

    Furthermore, anyone who receives the name of abbot is to lead his disciples by a twofold teaching: he must point out to them all that is good and holy more by example than by words, proposing the commandments of the Lord to receptive disciples with words, but demonstrating God’s instructions . . . by a living example.  Again, if he teaches his disciples that something is not to be done, then neither must he do it (RB 2.11-13).

    Mimetic human beings copy each other, even when they have no idea what’s going on (René Girard). Children especially copy their parents–maybe not now, but thirty years from now, when they face your situation and have no model for how to react except how you react today. If there’s a contradiction between what you tell your children and what you actually do, they will have to untangle your mess. So do everyone a favor and try to be consistent.

    How is it that you can see a splinter in your brother’s eye, and never notice the plank in your own? Matthew 7:3 (RB 2.15)

    Whatever else you aim for, realize that the most important model you offer your children is the marriage of their parents.  The hardest part of marriage is handing to God the defects of your spouse and focusing instead on fixing your own flaws.  Each one of us should work on prying out the stake impaled through our own eyeball, so that when our spouse needs help with a splinter, we’ll be half blind but mobile.  If spouses each have one functioning eye and a hygienic patch, together they’ll have the perspective they need to guide their children.

    And yet, we do want to find ways to encourage our spouse to change for the better… One tactic is to sit down for an explicit swap talk, when each spouse gets to pick one thing (only one thing!) that you want the other person to work on. This is tricky, because the unhappiest person is going to ask for a more difficult change. The other spouse can feel hurt at the criticism and may not have an equally painful request to swap with. But don’t worry: what goes around comes around. Today, you’re the one who must make a huge effort, because your spouse can’t stand to be around you anymore. In a few years, the roles will be reversed. Your turn will come to ask, and the fact that you did try will give you more influence.

    It makes all the difference in how you feel about someone if you can see that the person is trying. The thing that’s so infuriating is to feel that you’re stuck with someone whose defect is making your life miserable and who stubbornly refuses to do anything about it. You start to think that the only solution is to escape from the marriage itself. But if you see your spouse attempting to do what you asked, you can feel sympathy instead of disgust. You can hope that life will get better.  

    It’s up to you to decide whether the story of your family will be a comedy or a tragedy.

    Hint: movies about imperfect families finding ways to work things out are always comedies. Some classics worth revisiting: Overboard; Meet The Parents; Father of the Bride; It’s a Wonderful Life; Mr. Mom; About a Boy; Three Men and a Cradle; The Family Man.

     

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  • Live Up To Your Titles: Father And Mother

    To be worthy of the task of governing a monastery, the abbot must always remember what his title signifies and act as a superior should (Rule of St. Benedict, 2.1).

    The father and mother must also remember what their titles signify. Today this seems to require a vocabulary review, even for native speakers.  Never in the history of tautology has such a frisson of excitement run through the announcement that a father is a man, and a mother is a woman.  Who knew that it would become controversial to read a dictionary out loud ?

    A man who begets a child has the responsibility to act as a father to his child.  A woman who conceives a child has the responsibility to act as a mother to her child.  Father and mother should be married to each other. The sacrament of matrimony is a sign of the relationship between Christ and the Church. The husband represents Christ, and the wife represents the Church (Mark 10:6-9; Catechism of the Catholic Church Part II, Chapter 3, Article 7: “The Sacrament of Matrimony.”)

    For two thousand years the Church never had to defend the essential maleness and femaleness of humanity. The Church has, however had lots of experience standing for the essential humanity of human beings.  It’s clear that a Christian understanding of the human being includes a dynamic between male and female. The harmony of masculinity with maleness and femininity with femaleness has always been obvious to everyone in all cultures, notwithstanding the variations peculiar to time and place.

    From the earliest days of the Church, men and women have always been called to develop the same spiritual qualites.  St. Paul lists these explicitly: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control (Galatians 5:22-23).  This is not an exhaustive list. There are other qualities such as courage and truthfulness that the Holy Spirit cultivates in those who belong to him.

    Both the father and the mother in a household are called to imitate Christ. Far from flattening their respective personalities or erasing their sexual differences, the Holy Spirit will fulfill and develop them, both as man and woman and as specific individuals with unique characteristics.  (Two authors who write eloquently on the individuation of Christians are G.K.Chesterton in Orthodoxy and C.S.Lewis in The Screwtape Letters).  One of the most important Christian themes is that you fulfill yourself not by focusing on your own personality but by focusing on Christ’s personality.  It’s from within this tradition that I am writing, and so most of what I say will be for parents as parents relating to children as children, without a lot of gender-specific commentary.

    On the other hand, I’m not sold on gender-inclusive language.  Having studied a few other languages, it strikes me that only English speakers take personal pronouns so personally.  I don’t have a problem accepting “he” as representing human beings in general. The whole point of a pronoun is to save you the trouble of listing out everyone you’re referring to.

    Representation is essential to Christianity, never mind democracy.  The Apostle John tells us that Christ is the Word of God, and he emphasizes the creative acts of Christ, the Verb.  But as redeemer of the world Christ also becomes the Pronoun.  He is the atoning sacrifice who stands in for us before a holy God.  If you reject the power of “him” to represent you, don’t you reject the whole concept of redemption as well?

    But, since it’s impossible not to feel awkward in the third-person singular these days, I’ve decided just to collar the reader and address him or her as you, whoever you are.  I also refer to us, meaning we-the-people-who-are-still-making-an-effort.  My goal is to write succinctly, correctly and honestly.  If I write badly, I risk confusing you.  If I get something wrong, I risk misleading you.

    But if I say nothing at all, I risk offending the Master who reproached only the servant who refused to try (Matthew 25:14-30.)  I’ll do the best I can with the resources I’ve got.  Others are more than welcome to pitch in.  And in fact it’s necessary for each one to make an effort here.  Why would you yield your God-given sexuality to an atheist culture?  Be a man.  Be a woman.  Your choices will contribute to defining the terms.

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  • The Call: Awake!

    Let us get up then, at long last, for the Scriptures rouse us when they say: “It is high time for us to arise from sleep” Romans 13:11 (Rule of St. Benedict, Prologue.8)

    This “sleep” is the spiritual stupor of ordinary people who imagine that the front line is somewhere else. They think that they themselves have no responsibility for the outcome of the battle. They presume that they will suffer no consequences for their complacent inaction.

    I myself had an experience of a call involving Scripture and a stirring up from physical sleep, on a particular occasion.  At about 2 a.m., the morning of June 19, 2012, I woke up with the urgent sense that I should post verses of Scripture online.  So I thought, “I’ll do it tomorrow.”

    But the urgency increased.  I felt that I must check what the readings for the day were–not in the Upper Room guide to prayer that I’d been using for twenty-two years, but in the Catholic Missal, which I had downloaded on my phone at some point but had never even opened before.  I fumbled with my phone in the middle of the night and read the readings: 1 Kings 21: 17-29 (the Lord sends Elijah to confront Ahab). Then there was Psalm 51 (“…in the greatness of your compassion wipe out my offense….). The Gospel was Matthew 5: 43-48 (“love your enemies“).  Then I checked the daily Bible verse and saw Acts 17:30-31:

    God has overlooked the times of ignorance, but now he demands that all people everywhere repent, because he has established a day on which he will judge the world with justice through a man he has appointed, and he has provided confirmation for all by raising him from the dead.

    There was a “share” feature on the app to connect to Facebook.  It was urgent that I must do so immediately.  I signed in, and I posted the verse.

    This experience had never happened to me before.  It hasn’t happened again since.  Afterwards, trying to come to terms with it, I explained to God that this was the wrong message to the wrong person at the wrong time.

    First of all, these days God does not “demand” anything.  God is lucky if anyone condescends to acknowledge that he might exist.  Second, if God wants to get a message out to all people everywhere, my Facebook page is not the place to do it.  Third, people these days don’t repent.  A few religious people make a practice of repenting routinely, but the people who do most of the sinning aren’t interested in repentance at all.  There must have been some mistake.  The angel tapped the wrong person on the shoulder.  I don’t have the credentials, the platform, the authority, or the influence.

    But St. Benedict actually gives some insight into the call of God.  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?” Psalm 34:12 (Rule of St. Benedict, Prologue.14-15)

    There’s a promise here, and it’s not just pie in the sky bye ‘n bye.  The promise of God for those who will heed him is a good life beginning here and now.

    With this conclusion, the Lord waits for us daily to translate into action, as we should, his holy teachings.  Therefore our life span has been lengthened by way of a truce, that we may amend our misdeeds.  As the Apostle says, “Do you not know that the patience of God is leading you to repent?” Romans 2:4 (RB Prologue.35-37)

    The call to each of us is to translate into action daily the teachings that we believe to be true.  How do we live them out in ordinary life within a culture that has explicitly rejected them and that organizes itself along opposing principles?

    Therefore we intend to establish a school for the Lord’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. (RB Prologue.45-48)

    Every Christian home is such a school.  If the home is spiritually chaotic, then the child may emerge into adulthood unfit for any good purpose.  Discipline costs effort every day.  But the rejection of discipline costs far more. Everyone pays the price in illness, despair, loneliness and worse.  Rather than raging at evil in others elsewhere, let us combat it where we are.  The battle for good against evil will be won or lost in our own homes.

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  • The Challenge

    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. (RB Prologue.3)

    St. Benedict is of course not the first to describe the Christian life as a spiritual battle: St. Paul used that figure of speech in his letters.  On the face of it, however, it seems a bit histrionic to associate the domestic life with anything as dramatic as “battle.”  Surely the metaphor is overblown.

    But then you hear of another teenager who has committed suicide; of another husband who has abandoned his family; of another wife who has had an affair.  You see people with all sorts of destructive habits hurting themselves and their children.  The national abortion statistics come in for the year.  Then it’s your own friends whose marriages rot out.  Their cute kids grow up and do shocking things in the janitor’s closet in high school.  You watch a four year-old fall apart emotionally because she realizes that her father just doesn’t care.  You watch a seven year-old learn to be stoic.  A battle?  It’s a rout; a massacre; a spiritual slaughter.  And if you abandon your post, not only you but your children will join the list of casualties.

    So there is a war raging.  Whether or not you want to fight, it will involve you.  But how can obedience be a weapon?  Isn’t that a hopelessly unfashionable idea?  In Discipleship, the WWII-era Lutheran pastor, Dietrich Bonhoeffer makes the point that obedience to the commands of God is inseparable from faith in God. “You complain that you cannot believe?  No one should be surprised that they cannot come to believe so long as, in deliberate disobedience, they flee or reject some aspect of Jesus’ commandment.”

    Following the epistle of St. James, Bonhoeffer was explaining to a modern readership how false it is to think that an experience of faith must precede an act of obedience.  On the contrary, you must take action to obey in order to experience faith.  Bonhoeffer stepped away from the trend of Germanic philosophy since Kant and rejected the primacy of the thing in the mind over the thing in action.  He stood against Nazi Germany and lost his life as a result.  His side–our side–won that war, but insidious theories of self-invention spread through the post-war culture.

    These days a call to obedience sounds like an insult, to many people.  In the postmodern context, we are self-referential by default.  We find ourselves sequestered inside labile minds, no longer even able to rely on the modern concept of the coherent individual, who at least knew who he was and what he wanted.  More than in previous ages we need to obey the commands of God so as not to be constantly tossed about by our own confused thoughts and erratic feelings.

    But once we’ve obeyed the revealed commands of God—then what?  There’s all the rest of mundane life to live.  Must each individual at every moment debate every choice that needs to be made?  In a chaotic and arbitrary culture, willfully given over to the cult of randomness, it would be less exhausting to have some templates handy, some aids for the organization of behavior. A rational person faces relentless buffeting by the sheer nihilism of the surrounding environment.  A Domestic Rule would be helpful, to provide some guidelines for self-regulation.

     

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  • The Motivation

    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. (Rule of St. Benedict, Prologue.1)

    When I first thought of writing a domestic rule, the idea was completely sarcastic. In the culture that surrounds me, there are no two things so disdained as domesticity and regulation. But it irked me that out of twenty centuries of Church history, nobody had ever written a rule for married people raising children. It irked me so much that gradually I came to entertain more seriously the idea of writing one myself.  The question is not what the Christian life should look like in its mature state. There are innumerable resources to tell us that. The question is how to raise infants from formless chaos to that mature state, and how to survive the process.

    I feel sure that the things I’ve learned as an ordinary Christian wife and mother have been learned before by many women who were not able to record their experiences in writing.  For many centuries, only a tiny fraction of the population could read, much less write. Writing materials were too expensive to waste on merely personal reflections. So, written documents tended not to contain mundane details.  Even when education and materials became more widely available, how many mothers had the leisure to write anything more than a personal letter to a specific child at a specific moment? They were too tired all the time, and nobody ever asked.

    Out of all the famous leaders of any denomination, only John Wesley, to my knowledge ever asked his mother, Susanna Wesley, to write down her thoughts on raising children.  The only way to account for such a gaping hole in Christian teaching is to acknowledge that the Church for most of its existence has taken for granted that ordinary people would perform the tasks of child-rearing as a matter of course. Nobody ever wrote a domestic rule because nobody ever imagined a society without families.

    Then the twentieth century came along and gave the world atheist experiments in total annihilation of the family. Western countries resisted totalitarian ideologies only to yield to decomposing forces that have dissolved all the primary bonds. Mothers kill their children and call it freedom. Brothers and sisters train to compete against each other, not to love each other. The bond between father and son has become a fight for dominance.

    These existential topics were on my mind, but I hesitated to take on the extra work involved in doing this project.  I started putting pen to paper only after hearing of four healthy people who suddenly died, within a week or so of each other. There was a family friend who went in for surgery and died on the operating table. A business contact dropped dead of a heart attack while working out in the gym. A seventeen year-old shot himself “accidentally.” A woman bled to death giving birth to her fourth baby. It occurred to me that I might not have much time left myself. Before I go, I want to record some parenting advice for my own children as they raise families.

    What follows is not a polemical essay but a personal testimony.  What I myself have learned in the course of struggling to live an ordinary Christian life as that deplorable relic, a housewife, I now proclaim to you. I write so that you may live joyful lives. And I hope that I can spare you many heartaches and miseries by carefully and honestly parsing out the elemental details that are so often taken for granted.  Anything objectionable in what follows I have carefully considered and have decided to include anyway, as an alternative to something worse that I fear more.

    A rule is not a set of laws to obey. A rule is a pattern, a multi-faceted template, to which one can turn when it’s not clear what to do next. The goal is not to be domestic nor to be regulated, but to live a Christian life—even in domesticity. How does one raise children in happy homes that everyone is not always trying to escape from? As my own template I’m taking the Rule of Saint Benedict. Of all the choices I’ve made, this is one of the few that seemed, quite simply, obvious.

     

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