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 St. Benedict's Rule, trans. by Patrick Barry, OSB, 1997.)
Keeping death always before my eyes -- I am reading this very closely as St. Benedict's advice about how to live in community. He's not telling me to be morbid, or lost in fantasies, and be a downer to everyone around me. Instead Benedict ties the constant reality of death to realizing the presence of God. The constant reality of death is nothing other than life beyond the ego, the key to life in community.
D"But faith is a process: there is still scope for its development. Throughout the Gospel of Mark, Jesus will keep goading the disciples with their lack of faith, even while slowly it struggles forward. In them as in us, faith and unbelief coexist. We are in two minds, “like the waves of the sea blown about and whipped up by the wind” (Jas 1:6).". (Michael Casey, "Full y Human, Fully Divine", Chap 11). Abba, open me to allowing you to develop in me a single-minded following of you, to return your single-hearted love of the unique creature that you have made me, to fall ever more deeply in love with you.
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