Benedict’s Prologue

I am studying the monastic Rule of St Benedict. This piece is one of my reflections on the experience. To read the whole series click here.

Our second unit of study, during August/September, was the Prologue of the Rule.

It begins with the word ‘Listen…’. A word almost complete unto itself. Perhaps if the Rule started and ended with this one word it would be enough to guide us through our lives. If we truly listened, to ourselves, to others, to the divine, we wouldn’t need any other instruction, but we are all horribly fallible and so we do.

When I’ve read the Prologue before, I’ve been struck by its beauty and its warmth, and during my readings and reflections on it this time the same lovely, stirring phrases struck me:

…turn the ear of your heart to the advice of a loving father…

Now is the hour for us to rise from sleep. Let us, then open our eyes to the divine light, and hear with our ears the divine voice…

Run while you have the light of life…

Let us make for ourselves a girdle out of faith and good works…

…we must make ready our hearts and bodies to engage in the warfare of holy obedience…

But for the very first time, probably through concentrated repeated reading, the sheer masculinity of the writing also struck me: my son, he, him, his, father, brothers.

Now of course I realise that Benedict was a man, writing for men, referring to the teachings of Christ, and to God – who in Benedict’s language is masculine. (No modern gender-neutrality for Benedict!) But logic rather flew out of the window and this all began to make me feel excluded from my beloved St Benedict for the first time. It began to make me dwell again on the exclusion of women by the church through the ages, and by the Catholic church to this day.

So this study experience was not altogether comfortable or comforting. (Not necessarily a bad thing in itself of course.)

But now that a little time has passed, what I keep coming back to is one of the phrases I love the best and which for me encapsulates much of what the Rule is about:

…we must at all times use the good gifts God has placed in us…

If you take this together with the very first word of the Prologue, I think you have the kernel of guidance we all must follow, whatever our sacred practices: we must listen deeply to discern what our gifts truly are, and we must use them. Not to do so is to waste what we have been given.

Sometimes we’re not very good at acknowledging our gifts, because they seem natural to us, or because we see our faults too clearly. And sometimes we puff up what we think our gifts are at the expense of our genuine giftedness because we’re clever at something society says is valuable. So active discernment and quiet listening is very important.

All this puts me in mind of the words of Marianne Williamson used in Nelson Mandela’s famous speech, so I think I’ll leave you with them (emboldening my emphasis):

Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, and fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small doesn’t serve the world. There’s nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We are born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It’s not just in some of us, it’s in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.

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