Chapter 4: Guidelines for Christian and monastic good practice (paragraphs 1-2)
Renounce your own desires and ambitions so as to be free to follow Christ. (From para. 2 of Ch. 4 of Saint Benedict's Rule, trans. by Patrick Barry, 1997.)
If I don't follow my own desires and ambitions today, what am I going to do? St Benedict is telling me to to follow Christ. And for that, I need to let go of not only my desires and ambitions, but also my ego's idea of what it means to be free. And that way is through selfless attention. If I do my best today with with selfless attention, my heart is not weighed down, but free.
"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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