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.
Gardeners live and work with the hope and joy of death always before them. They administer death to seeds by laying them into the disintegrating soil or cutting, pruning, the growing plants.
ReplyDeleteHelp me to embrace the joy of my personal daily dying with you just as the gardener does who loves his work.