When I was young enough to be at the beginning of my adult faith-life, but not old enough to have any idea how I would live out my Christian vocation, I was given a copy of the Rule of St Benedict. I had never seen the Rule before and had barely even heard of St Benedict, but as I read that short document I experienced a wonderful shock of recognition: “This is a How-to for living close to the Lord,” I thought. “This Rule is something I can begin to follow now and take with me to the end of my life. It is exactly what I was looking for.”
I had no inkling then that I would eventually enter monastic life. I was a dedicated professional ballet dancer and teacher. At that point, I just wanted ‘to find God,’ as I put it to myself. So when I came to the place in the Rule where the monk who is in charge of newcomers is instructed to be concerned whether or not the novice “truly seeks God,” I felt that I had chosen the right document to follow; seeking God was what I wanted to do. Wait - didn’t I just say I wanted to find God? I did. But I was beginning to taste the paradox that the search for God is at the same time the finding of God.
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There were so many things about the Rule that I could put in place right away: not only the daily attendance at the liturgy, personal prayer and lectio divina, but the more difficult and interior endeavours could be taken up also, such as the cultivation of humility. I was amazed to see that St Benedict places humility in the context of our relationships with God and with others. He does not reduce it to a self-to-self conversation in which we try to become ‘lowly’ somehow. Obedience, too, is paramount in the Rule. As a lay Catholic, I had no monastic superior to obey, but I saw that I could practice a more fundamental obedience to the Church through acceptance of her teaching authority and the study of her doctrines. Even though I was not living the monastic life, there was plenty to be getting on with.
But what really challenged me was the Rule’s first word, “Listen.” This stood out for me in all its counter-cultural depth. Nothing in my upbringing, my professional training or my education had even hinted that listening could and should be important. Listening, as I had understood it until then, was a mere mechanism to obtain information—or it was little more than a form of social politeness. Listening was, I thought, at the service of ego-building: it was a means of obtaining knowledge—and wasn’t it well-known that knowledge was power? Listening was just the thing you had to do in order to figure out how to get your ego out there, how to play the games that would ensure success in social and professional life
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But the listening enjoined on the follower of the Rule was something else entirely. It was a continual stance. It was a radical openness of mind and spirit to the voice of a loving father—St Benedict, but more deeply the divine presence that upholds all being: the Word of God made flesh in Jesus. And the reward of listening? I soon learned that it was joy: the joy that comes from a deepened awareness that there really is a God to listen to, and from a deepened understanding of what our life on earth is really for.
In my experience, the great heritage of the Holy Rule is that whatever you are already in the middle of doing, however you are currently living your life, the Rule can be lived in a way that brings God himself, with his joy and peace, into the mind and heart. We can begin immediately with the first word, “Listen.”
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Johanna Caton, O.S.B.
Minster Abbey
2024
Beautiful