Benedictine Spirituality

Every morning at 5:30AM (and at a slightly more merciful 7:15AM on Sundays), the Benedictine monks of St. Meinrad rise from their beds, gather together in their common prayer space, and begin to pray.  They have not spoken since 10PM the previous evening, making their first words of the day significant. Their leader speaks a line from Psalm 51: “O Lord, open my lips.”  His brothers respond in unison, “…and my mouth will proclaim your praise.”    

This June, I spent five days at St Meinrad, a monastery nestled in rural southern Indiana taking a class on Benedictine spirituality with Fr. Brendan Moss, OSB, a monk of the house.  Along with nine other lay Catholics, I kept the liturgy of the hours, prayed lectio divina (an ancient form of reflection on Scripture), lived and ate in community, attended class, and practiced so-called “holy leisure.”  Of all the elements of our full days, I found rising early to pray to be the most challenging.  Getting up early feels like a terrible imposition. So, I find the words of the psalmist very appropriate: my lips do not feel like opening but, God, let me use that irritation to praise you. 

Like the Benedictines, Muslims prays 5 times a day. At dawn, a muezzin calls the faithful to prayer with these words, “God is great, God is great … Prayer is better than sleep.”  Prayer is better than sleep.  At sunup, I may feel differently, but the wisdom of the hours is this: each of us has a time of day—and more broadly, a time in our lives—when we would rather not pray, when another thing (sleep, work, a phone call, a book) seems more important.  At those times, it is most important that we pray. 

The Benedictine motto is Ora et Labora: pray and work.  Both elements are important, but prayer is the first and the greater of the two.  Monastics take seriously Paul’s injunction to pray without ceasing.  Work stops when the abbey church bells ring.  So too is it balanced by the mandated times of rest, leisure, and reflection. But prayer is never neglected.  Fr. Brendan taught us that it is work that is the interruption of prayer, not the other way around, no matter how important that work may be.      

Prayer is relentless. At the end of five days, I felt exhausted.  Not physically exhausted—the work of the house is more of an intellectual bent these days—but spiritually worn down.   It takes a religious athlete to pray for four hours a day, offered at the regular intervals of early morning, midmorning mass, noon, evening, and night prayers.  The monks do not take days off from their vigil.  Their ceaseless task—their vocation—is to keep the Divine Office, to pray the hours, to do the opus dei (work of God).  They are, as Fr. Brendan put it, the official “pray-ers” of the Church.  In that capacity, the Order of Saint Benedict is like the Ironman of devotion. 

Part of the daily routine for Benedictines is holy reading (lectio divina), an ancient practice of reading, reflecting, and resting with Scripture.  It involves repeated readings of a passage (usually the daily Gospel segment), pausing between each iteration to allow the words to sink and penetrate deeper. 

I do not have a great deal of experience with this Benedictine form of prayer.  I have practiced it only three or four times, half of them during this spirituality class.  I was struck by how certain words or phrases of the Gospel reverberate through repetition.  After hearing and reading a passage four or five times, a story or instruction acquires a reality to it that isn’t present with a cursory reading or even its proclamation in liturgy.  I could vividly envision the Gospel scene from one the passages of our holy reading.  It reminded me of the Jesuit spiritual practice of imaging yourself within the story (perhaps this is a derivate of lectio). 

I would like to spend more time practicing lectio. I can see how it would be extremely valuable for a preacher wishing to gain insight in composing a sermon.  After using lectio on the Gospel reading the day before it was proclaimed at Mass, I felt extremely familiar with it, and it acquired a depth that I have rarely encountered during the Liturgy of the Word. 

 One of the hallmarks of Benedictine spirituality is hospitality.  The 5^th century Rule of St. Benedict, the foundational book of instruction for community life, states, “All guests who present themselves are to be welcomed as Christ, for him himself will say: I was a stranger and you welcomed me (Matt. 25-35)” (Chapter 53).

In my time on the hill (as St. Meinrad is affectionately known), I have not seen dramatic gestures of welcome or hospitality.  The monks lead busy lives and are surprising small in number compared to the numerous retreatants, lay employees, visitors, and seminarians, professors, and lay students studying at the adjacent school of theology. Yet the place itself speaks, “welcome.”  The clearest sign of this is the lack of locked doors, even on rooms where security would be prudent.  There are few places that are closed to the guest.  That is not to say that there are no boundaries: the living quarters (or cells) and the monastic dining room are off-limits to visitors.  Still, these are not marked with intimidating signage. This aspect of the hill reminds me of Woody Guthrie’s famous folk song, “This Land is Your Land,” in which he sings:

As I went walking I saw a sign there/ And on the sign it said "No Trespassing." / But on the other side it didn't say nothing, / That side was made for you and me.

 

St. Meinrad is made both for the guests that it welcomes, and the men of God who live there.  The stranger is to be made at home and received as if she is Christ himself.  The message is not, “keep out,” but “be welcome, and peace to all who enter here.” 

            During my stay, I observed one other small sign of Benedictine hospitality from the abbot of the monastery, Fr. Justin.  I met Fr. Justin a year ago at my graduation from St. Meinrad’s graduate school. He knows my grandfather and came to talk to the two of us following the ceremony.  During my recent stay on the hill, my interaction with him was limited to Mass each day. I happened to be in his line for the Eucharist all four mornings.  When he offered the host to me, he said my name: “the Body of Christ, Ned.” 

            This minor touch really impressed me.  Fr. Justin had not seen me in a year, and yet felt confident enough to call me by name.  I am sure the abbot communicates with scores of people on a weekly basis.  The abbacy is a significant office with many responsibilities to people both inside and outside of the monastery.  Fr. Justin, however, made an effort to know who I am to personally communicate that I am welcome there. 

            As part of my class requirements, I read the book Radical Hospitality: Benedict’s Way of Love  by Daniel Homan, OSB and Lonni Collins Pratt.  Fr. Daniel is a Benedictine monk of St. Benedict Monastery in Oxford, Michigan.  Pratt is a laywoman who has spent much of her time at Fr. Daniel’s monastery and working at the adolescent retreat center on its grounds.  Both have co-authored several books on Benedictine spirituality. 

            In Homan and Pratt’s definition (which they would insist is actually St. Benedict’s), hospitality is not a domestic virtue, not a Martha Stewart kind of good housekeeping. Instead, it “is a lively, courageous, and convivial way of living that challenges our compulsion either to turn away or to turn inward and disconnect ourselves from others” (9).  Hospitality is actually about our inward disposition towards other people.  It is about how open we are to receiving the stranger—the inconvenient or entirely other person who asks something from us. 

            I found this concept both challenging and true.  I teach social justice to high school students, and they constantly rationalize their preference for turning away from those who aren’t “their kind of people:” the homeless, immigrants, blacks, the disabled and the poor.   Homan and Pratt point out that hospitality means making ourselves vulnerable to just these sorts of people.  This involves discomfort and the possibility of being hurt.  They write, “When I consider the stranger I am faced with my worst fears.  I can’t deny that I am afraid and that I don’t even always like people” (15). 

            We live in a culture that teaches “Stranger Danger” to young children.  Most of us never grow out of this knee-jerk distrust of people we don’t know.  We avoid eye contact when passing on the sidewalk or even cross the street if someone looks particularly dubious.  We may not even be aware of the people around us, so fully are we immersed into our earbuds and smart phones.  We live in tidy little cells of our own construction, cut off from each other, blind to the presence of Christ in the distressing disguise of the interloper.  One root of this disconnection is fear—a fear of the other, which leads to the enemy of hospitality: suspicion (72).

            Another factor for this aversion to hospitality is hyper-individualism, or narcissism.  Homan and Pratt write that “we place the great ‘I’ at the center of our universe…. We make commodities of people, consuming them for our personal enrichment and happiness.  It’s common in our culture.  The other’s only purpose is what he or she can do for us” (72).  Becoming a person of hospitality means becoming other-focused. It means sacrificing some of the space in our hearts that we have given over to our own desires, needs, and fantasies and devoting it to other people.  

            Homan and Pratt’s focus on inner disposition of hospitality reminded me of discussion in my class about the Benedictine vow of obedience (one of three vows, along with stability and conversion that all monks must take).  This spiritual discipline also concerns one’s internal frame of mind more than a sort of external following of orders.  Obedience is about listening.

            The first word of the Rule is, “Listen!”  As I wrote above, many of us have shut out other people’s voices from our lives.  Most of all we have shut out silence.  The repetitive regime of Benedictine life makes space for silence, for listening to yourself, for examining your conscience, listening to other people, and listening for (and to) God.  It is hard, if not impossible, to avoid yourself in a monastery. The great ocean of silence makes the groaning of our hearts difficult to drown out.  Homan and Pratt write, “Ancient wounds to the psyche begin ascending into the conscious region of the mind, they float up like long-dead bodies” (91).  This sounds terrifying, but can be profoundly liberating.

            In my week at the monastery, I found myself gripped by just such a feeling as Homan and Pratt described.  I was overpoweringly confronted by my own sinfulness one morning after morning prayer (of course!).  In my mind, I grappled with some of the ugliest parts of my own past. It was unpleasant and unwanted—I was so absorbed that I hardly attended to the movements of prayer around me.  Clearly, this was something I needed to listen to, something I had ignored.  Yet, later that day, I was also listening when Fr. Brendan told us that if we have been to confession, all sins—even the desiccated, nasties lurking in our deepest recesses—have been forgiven. These past bones have no power because Christ has redeemed us.  He has given us new life, cast out the shadows, and expelled the demons.  Listen!

            As I began this reflection with the words a monk starts the day with, I will conclude with the ending of the Liturgy of the Hours: “May Almighty God grant us a restful night and a peaceful death.”  Benedictines are instructed to keep death always before their eyes and to greet the ending of the day as if it is the last.  Even death is a reality to listen to and to welcome.