WCCM Benedictine Oblates are encouraged to read a designated portion of the Rule daily, and to write a brief, personal response. I hope that this blog will support our Oblate community in this practice. Please, keep blog entries brief and in a first-person ("I") voice. Refrain from discussing, offering an opinion, or commenting on other entries. Simply consider how a particular section of the Rule is speaking to you in your present circumstances.
Tuesday, November 3, 2015
Chapter 27: The superior's care for the excommunicated
These are tough chapters. They call to the deepest kind of concern for another person who may be heading towards self-destruction, physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually. I cannot pretend that I have any answers in order to make hard decisions about another person’s welfare even in my own family.
The test for me now after many years is not to give into feelings of failure and weakness, but to look to Christ to whom Benedict is constantly directing me in the Rule and to whom I open my heart in meditation.
Does it mean I have answers today? No, but I Iike what Jean Vanier says in Community and Growth, that in a community, there is an acceptance of insignificance and a gratitude for the“seeds of eternity” which are small and visible in daily gestures of love and forgiveness. There is where my concern can show itself for the other, in the daily love and forgiveness gestures.
These are tough chapters. They call to the deepest kind of concern for another person who may be heading towards self-destruction, physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually. I cannot pretend that I have any answers in order to make hard decisions about another person’s welfare even in my own family.
ReplyDeleteThe test for me now after many years is not to give into feelings of failure and weakness, but to look to Christ to whom Benedict is constantly directing me in the Rule and to whom I open my heart in meditation.
Does it mean I have answers today? No, but I Iike what Jean Vanier says in Community and Growth, that in a community, there is an acceptance of insignificance and a gratitude for the“seeds of eternity” which are small and visible in daily gestures of love and forgiveness. There is where my concern can show itself for the other, in the daily love and forgiveness gestures.