What exactly is it that we celebrate on today’s solemnity
of Our Holy Father Benedict? It seems to me that, in honoring the Patriarch of
Western monasticism liturgically, we are not memorializing the existence of
monastic life as such, or even the Holy Rule that came from his pen. Rather, I’d
say we’re celebrating the source of
the Rule and of the way of life it teaches. This source can be nothing other
than St Benedict’s personal holiness—that
is, the heroic struggles and perseverance in love that mark his life through
his fidelity to grace. Without such holiness, offered by God and embraced by St
Benedict, the Rule by which we Cistercian monks have vowed to live could never
have come into existence.
In today’s gospel, the Lord Jesus assures us: You did not choose me, but I chose you and
appointed you that you should go and bear fruit and that your fruit should
abide. For us who are consecrated to live monastic life in this abbey, our
response to the call of Jesus is inseparable from St Benedict’s paternity of us
through the Rule, and from our sharing consequently in the particular graces of
his holiness. So I would like to point out one glaring feature that all three
of today’s readings have in common, something that can perhaps help us better understand
the kind of relationship we ought to cultivate with St Benedict in living out
our Benedictine-Cistercian vocation.
This striking feature is the fact that, in each selection
from Scripture, we hear the voice of a
wise speaker imparting spiritual instruction. In the first reading, it is
Solomon; in the second, St Paul addresses his beloved “saints”, the members of
the church at Corinth; and in the gospel, the Lord Jesus converses intimately
with his disciples at the Last Supper. In each case we sense the existence of a
strong bond between the wise teacher and those he addresses, a bond that
deserves to be called paternal. The
ardor, kindness, firmness and serenity of each seasoned elder are clear signs
that he is speaking out of a deep love, and
thus endeavoring to generate new life
in those with whom he is sharing the most precious treasure of his heart. In
the case of Jesus, this treasure is nothing less than his eternal relationship
with the Father.
The communication of divine wisdom, these readings show,
can happen only in the context of an I-Thou
dialogue, where heart can speak freely to heart. We, too, have to come
alive to the truths the Rule contains, engaging the heart of Benedict that birthed.
Casual indifference and neglect can turn
the Rule from an easy and life-giving yoke into a cumbersome dead and deadening
letter—that is, if we refuse in practice to enter into a promising I-Thou
exchange with its author.
In other words, an attitude
of docile receptivity as we listen to the master’s words is of the essence
in this dialogue, and the disciple can be receptive only when motivated by an
absolute trust that his elder is
speaking with love and on the basis of what he has himself long lived, struggled
with, and made his own. The wisdom that passes from master to disciple is no
abstract doctrine, but the fruit of the lived experience of God. Joy in God, in
the truth, in fullness of life, in filial communion, is the result of the
willingness of the elder to generate new life, to open up to another the heart
of his experience so as to allow the torrent of God’s love that dwells there to
pass over into a beloved spiritual son. To my mind, such is the meaning of the
first verse of the Holy Rule: “Listen, O my son, to the teachings of your
master, and turn to them with the ear of your heart. Willingly accept the
advice of a devoted father and put it into action.”
While ultimately a mere, humble pedagogue when compared
to Christ, Benedict, along our way to Christ, must at times speak to us like both a teacher and a father, as he
does here, but only vicariously, by way diaconal representation. No one is more
aware than St Benedict that, in fact, the race of Adam and Eve has only one Father, from whom every fatherhood, in heaven
or on earth, takes its name (Eph 3:14-15, NJB). For me the most moving aspect of the Rule is St Benedict’s
pedagogical desire to introduce us, his filial charges, to the paradise of life
and joy he has himself discovered by living in a monastery in obedience to God
and in communion with the brothers. To this paradise of life and joy Benedict
gives the more sober name of school of
the Lord’s service.
Still within this context of life-giving dialogue, you
may have noticed that each of our readings abounds in conditional if-clauses, such as Solomon’s if you receive my words, Paul’s if
I deliver up my body to be burned, and especially Jesus’ if you keep my commandments. The
hard-hitting meaning of all these conditional clauses is that the goodness,
generosity and love of the teacher, in order to have their intended effect, must
be reciprocated by his hearer, love for love. The disciple’s humble and
entreating eagerness to listen and learn,
his attitude of deep receptivity, is
the essential first step, but it is not enough; only the learner’s desire to obey the instructions and
commands he has been privileged to receive can move his will to put the received wisdom into practice.
Paternal,
generative love has been the motor force impelling the elder to teach, and
the corollary it elicits—obedient, filial
love—must now drive the disciple’s response to incarnate creatively in his
life the truths he has received. In the process
of spiritual rebirth, we must actively want
to be regenerated and must cooperate
intensely in the shaping of our own new life. Nothing here happens to us
automatically, for grace is highly personal and intensely engaging. Otherwise,
the attempted regeneration, even when it is God attempting it, will result in sad
fetal miscarriage. By our non-responsiveness we can tie up the hands even of an
omnipotent and loving God, for love cannot be imposed. To love is to respond
with glad freedom, to surrender to the Beloved with mirth.
In today’s second reading, St Paul sings his famous Hymn
to Divine Charity, in which he exposes the tragic vacuity of apparently
religious actions that do not have love
as their real driving force: If I speak
in the tongues of men and of angels, and so forth. No matter how well one
has learned one’s theology and how impressively one has performed even
heroic-seeming religious deeds (which surely include every aspect of monastic
observance and, in fact, monastic life itself!), if supernatural charity is not the fire fueling those actions and
observances, then the Christian monk
is nothing but a noisy gong or a clanging
cymbal. This is why St
Benedict declares, with unusual absoluteness, that one of the indispensable
“Instruments of Good Works” is To
prefer nothing to the love of Christ (RB 4).
Yet, transcending even this extraordinary hymn, today’s
gospel not only speaks about and exalts divine
love but actually brings us into the very
presence of Love incarnate by ushering
us into the presence of Jesus, the personal and living Wisdom of the Father.
This passage of John’s Gospel initiates us into the mystical dimension of Love.
Here, Jesus invites us to abide in himself as he abides in his Father.
Ultimately, we would have to speak with Bishop Barron of Eucharistic coinherence. Indeed, the chief benefit
of the Incarnation is that, in Christ, we encounter God himself without further
need for intermediaries. Thus, Benedict is for us an intermediary only in the
sense of being, again, the wise and humble pedagogue
who brings us by the hand of his expert instruction to the very threshold of the
place where we may behold with joy God’s radiance on the Face of Jesus, our
only Master, and partake of his life in the Father.
As pedagogue, the great Patriarch makes himself one of us
and cheers us on, saying: “As we progress in the monastic life and in faith,
our hearts will swell with the unspeakable sweetness of love, enabling us to
race along the way of God’s commandments” (Prologue). Through all his
prescriptions, Benedict’s sole goal is to bring us, along with himself, to
Christ, knowing that only the radiant Christ Jesus, the one Mediator between God and men (1 Tim 2.5), can say to us: Abide in my love … that your joy may be full.
But here, too, a non-negotiable condition is indispensable: Are we willing
to pay the cost in self-oblation required for abiding in Christ’s love, which
Jesus himself defines as the willingness to lay
down one’s life for one’s friends?
Somewhere during this meditation I was struck by the
realization that, in each of the readings, we hear only one side of the dialogue—that
of the wise speaker who shares his wisdom with us. In the case of Jesus, Wisdom
incarnate shares with us the very substance of his own life as Second Person of
the Blessed Trinity, desiring us to enter into permanent intimate communion
with himself. This one-sidedness in the form of the readings must mean that we disciples
must, in the end, complete the dialogue by inscribing our part not in words
written in ink but with the honey and the blood of our anonymous lives as Christian monks, known to God alone.
In his Prologue, St Benedict comments on some words of
Jesus he has just quoted. He remarks: “Having finished his discourse, the Lord waits for us to respond by action every
day to his holy warnings.” How lovely to see in this exhortation the fact that
the great Patriarch, even while legislating, actually includes himself among his questing disciples by use of the
inclusive, communal we. This is a decisive
and specifically Christian trait, I think: I mean envisioning the abbot not
only as a paterfamilias but, in the
end, as simply another conservus Christi—just
one more fellow servant among the servants
of Christ (sýndouloi: Mt
18:28-29; Col 1:7, 4:7; Rev 19:10, 22:9). Such a staggering reversal in outlook
and self-presentation could never have originated in Benedict’s Roman social
background, in which the role of paterfamilias
was all-determining, massively solid, unyielding. Yet here and often in the
Rule, the dignified and bearded Patriarch presents himself to us not only as a humble
pedagogue or “nanny” but even, like Jesus, “wearing an apron”, as it were, and
ready to serve his brothers (cf Jn
13:4-5).
Let us
then, my brothers, give thanks for the privilege of being here today
celebrating God’s gift to the Church of St Benedict’s fruitful apostolic holiness,
and let us not keep our Lord waiting—at
least not for too long!—but gladly respond to this gift by bearing abundant
fruit from the seed Our Holy Father Benedict has sown in us by divine
dispensation.
Detail of a fresco by Fra Angelico, San Maro, Florence, 1441. Today's homily by Father Simeon.
