Chapter 58: The reception of candidates for the community (paragraphs 4-5)
Before making their profession novices should give any possessions they may have either to the poor or to the monastery in a formal document keeping back for themselves nothing at all in the full knowledge that from that day they retain no power over anything -- not even over their own bodies. (From para. 5 of Ch. 58 of Saint Benedict's Rule, trans. by Patrick Barry, OSB, 1997.)
Retaining no power over anything, controlling nothing even with my thoughts and fantasies -- this is the poverty of spirit that the mantra demands.
I hear in this paragraph the need for me to separate out the valuable from the worthless, the prized from the irrelevant, and what is precious from the dross and gloss and the need for me to remain non-attached to material possessions and this involves even my own body. A line pops into my head from Isaiah 43:4 where I am told that I am precious. An unwrapping is going on here for me about how this preciousness impacts me.It is meditation and the separating tool, the mantra, which takes me to the valuable, the prized, and the precious within me, within this temple body which will also be discarded like the clothes of the monastic in this chapter of the Rule.
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