Chapter 4: Guidelines for Christian and monastic good practice (paragraphs 6-8)
Keep the reality of death always before your eyes, have a care about how you act every hour of your life and be sure that God is present everywhere and that he certainly sees and understands what you are about. (From para. 7 of Ch. 4 of Saint Benedict's Rule, trans. by Patrick Barry, OSB, 1997.)
Keeping the reality of death always before my eyes is countercultural advice, to say the least. But it gets easier as I get older, both through scrapes with mortality and the realization that all I can really do with life is to love it on its own terms. But most significantly, letting go of my ego in meditation gives me a glimmering of experience of the quality of being that comprehensively bright and expansive and ever-present.
“To keep death daily before one’s eyes.” I like to watch the video of Fr. David Steindl-Rast, a Benedictine monk about Death and Spirituality. In fact, I’ve viewed it a dozen of times already. I like it most when he said, if you know how to live actively (to be fully alive), you will know how to die actively. And to be fully alive means letting go, to meet the unknown, to be fully surprised… and that to him is a little death… dying to this present moment to be alive in the next moment. That exactly is what I need to do now, to experience a little death by letting go of my inordinate attachments to my feelings, thoughts and even to people important to me.
ReplyDeleteBenedict’s words here remind me of Don Juan, the Yaqui Indian guru’s advice to Carlos Castaneda: “It is always good to keep death as a close advisor.” Or, as Jesus puts it, “he who would save his life will lose it and he who loses his life will find it.” “I die daily,” wrote Paul. Embracing my daily death opens me to life and love and joy. I daily die to all thought and imagination saying my mantra, and daily rise to the silence, stillness and simplicity that is you, Abba. Laying aside, dying to, my hyperactive human doing allows me to become a human being, to say with you, “I am”.
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