Chapter 4: Guidelines for Christian and monastic good practice (paragraphs 1-2)
The first of all things to aim at is to love the Lord God with your whole heart and soul and strength and then to love your neighbour as much as you do yourself. (From para. 1of Ch. 4 of Saint Benedict's Rule, trans. by Patrick Barry, OSB, 1997.)
St. Benedict's first rules in Christian and monastic life are down-to-earth, relational, and respectful. But the aim of which he speaks is for me, clearly, the practice of the mantra, the selfless focussing of attention that leads to purity of heart.
When I started reflecting on the Rule this year, I was looking forward to this part where instruments of good works are detailed. It maybe shameful but I just realized that I just know the commandments in my mind. Now I am beginning, to digest them one by one … slowly letting them sink deep into my heart.
ReplyDelete“The next phase of relationship opens in a movement of wonder. If philosophy, according to Aristotle, begins in wonder, so too, as Gregory of Nyssa claimed, God is better known by wonder than thought. Friendship deepens into the being of ‘another myself’ when the sheer amazing existence of another in our life hits us. With Jesus it is like, after admiring someone from a distance, we realize we have really fallen in love with them.” (Laurence Freeman, “Jesus The Teacher Within” Ch12). What this monastic life without walls, including meditation, seems to be doing for me is to facilitate this process of wonder, of my falling in love more and more deeply each day. Abba, Spirit of Love, keep me faithfully on this path of wonder.
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