The Rule of Benedict: A Spirituality for the 21st Century (Spiritual Legacy Series)

the message of Benedictine spirituality is a consistent one: live life normally, live life thoughtfully, live life profoundly, live life well.

there is no escape from life, only a chance to confront it, day after day in all its sanctifying tedium and blessed boredom and glorious agitation in the communities of which we are a part at any given moment of our lives.

Each of us needs a wisdom figure to walk the Way with us as well as a rule to route us.

Do your work, then step back. The only path to serenity.

Prayer is, then, the natural response of people who know their place in the universe. It is not designed to be a psychological comfort zone though surely comfort it must. And lastly, it is an act of community and an act of awareness.

we will now begin to observe without effort, as though naturally, from habit, no longer out of fear of hell, but out of love for Christ, good habit, and delight in virtue.

It is so easy to love the God we do not see but it is so much more sanctifying to serve the God we learn to see in others.

The call to contemplation here is the call not simply to see Christ in the other but to treat the other as Christ. Benedict calls us first to justice: love God, love the other, do no harm to anyone.

true humility is simply a measure of the self that is taken without exaggerated approval or exaggerated guilt.

We are not, in other words, even the author of our own prayer life. It is the goodness of God, not any virtue that we have developed on our own, that brings us to the heart of God. And it is with God’s help we seek to go there.