Christian parents help to redeem and transform the world by building a good home, for good homes are the building blocks of a solid, prosperous and peaceful society. When this calling to parenthood is linked with a strong Christian vision, the home, as Tertullian said, becomes the ‘seminary of the human race’, and the Christian father and mother find in their parental roles a path which leads to heaven.
The Christian family can be the place for the soul's training because it is, by its nature, a Christian community. A person may choose a convent or a monastery to join, but they cannot choose every monk they have to live with; neither can they choose every successive abbot or abbess to whom they must vow obedience. Likewise, we may choose our wives or husbands, but we can't choose all our in-laws and we certainly can't choose our children. They are given to us and we must learn to live with them in community. Since Jesus first called twelve men to live in intimate community with him, the Church has been a family, a community, a Kingdom of God. So it is with the natural family: we find within our own home all the necessary ingredients for progress in the Christian life.
St John has written, ‘Those who live in love live in God and God lives in them.’ So within the love of the Christian family the father can come to understand and dwell in all wisdom. Through his love with his wife, the two share in a union which is as intimate as the one Christ shares with his Church. Through their relationship with the children a three-way bond is nurtured which takes each family member into a love which reflects the Holy Trinity itself, for there Father, Son and Holy Spirit exist in the perfect unity of the Divine Family. The ordinary Christian home is part of the God-given sacrament of marriage, and as in all sacraments it is a physical means of meeting the invisible God face to face.
This is a high ideal. It sounds mystical and sublime. But the reality often seems far from celestial. Being a parent is a gritty, realistic and demanding vocation. Our lives are rooted in the physical and emotional needs of small children. We need to be equipped for Christian fatherhood. There are many resources for spiritual growth, but not many which combine the practical demands of fatherhood with the aspirations of the spiritual journey. Some books are full of practical advice on parenting while others take us on a wonderful, but too other-worldly, journey of spirituality. Not many books combine practical advice with spiritual insight. The Rule of St Benedict, more than any other, combines the two into a fully incarnational guide to life.
The Life and Rule of St Benedict
The sixth-century Rule of St Benedict is a code written for the foundation and maintenance of a Christian monastery. It has been in use for the last fifteen hundred years as the basis for every Benedictine monastery and convent and for many other religious orders which are loosely Benedictine. Some scholars even credit Benedict and his Rule as the foundation of Western civilization, for there the basic guidelines of all community can be traced, and it was the monastic communities, following Benedict's inspiration, which kept human learning and civilization alive during the Dark Ages.
Benedict's Rule may have been written with sixth-century needs in mind, but it has stood the test of time because of Benedict's profound understanding of human psychology. Benedict understands that we need something to aspire towards, but we also need a realistic view of ourselves. We need to reach for the stars, but keep our feet on the ground. Like all works of genius, Benedict's Rule inspires and humbles us at the same time. He takes us to lofty heights, and yet his Rule is full of practical wisdom and principles of human relationship which can be applied to almost any situation where people live and work together. A serious reading of Benedict will enlighten and inspire not only our family life, but our relationships at work, in the parish, and in our wider community.
Although it was written for monks, Benedict's Rule is not a piece of mystical writing as such. It doesn't give extravagant and obscure teaching on prayer and mysticism. The Rule is a practical document for everyday living. It is modest in its aim: indeed, Benedict himself calls it a ‘little Rule for beginners’. The Rule is also modest in its composition. Benedict never claims complete originality. Christian monasticism began in Egypt in the middle of the fourth century, and Benedict has drawn from the literature of those first Egyptian monks – the Desert Fathers. He also relies on the Eastern Conferences of Cassian and on the contemporary Rule of the Master. But Benedict makes his own mark. Unlike the earlier writers, Benedict promotes a new balance. He tempers monastic austerities with a gentle tolerance of human weakness. He eschews extremism and builds a Rule which strives for heaven while understanding how bound we are to earth. For Benedict heaven and earth are not in conflict; as a master of incarnational spirituality he helps us see ‘heaven in ordinary’. So every material possession is to be treated as a sacred vessel of the altar, and Christ is to be seen in the abbot, every brother, and every guest of the monastery.
Benedict the Man
Benedict's Rule speaks to our time because he also wrote in a century of social upheaval and uncertainty. In AD 410 – seventy years before he was born – Rome fell to the barbarian invasions, and by the middle of the sixth century Rome had been sacked for a second time and the Huns were ravaging northern Italy. The civil authority was in tatters; wars, violence and anarchy were raging and the Church too was torn in pieces by theological controversy over the nature of grace. In the midst of this turbulent time Benedict managed to construct a way of life which rode the storm like an ark in the raging flood.
Benedict was born around 480 into a noble family of Nursia. He was sent to Rome to study, but abandoned the city because of the decadence he saw there. He went to live the hermit's life in the hills near Subiaco where he was looked after by another solitary monk. Eventually he was invited to become the abbot of a nearby monastery, but after almost being poisoned by the rebellious monks he left. He finally settled with some brothers at Monte Cassino, where the reconstructed mother house of the Benedictine order still stands today. Some distance away his sister Scholastica had established a convent of nuns, and Benedict met with her once a year. Before his death Benedict's friend and confidant, Servandus, tells us how he was summoned to Benedict's cell one night. Benedict had got up in the night to pray and he saw a bright light come down from heaven. Encapsulated in that light was the entire created order ‘as if gathered into a single ray of light’. This ultimate vision of the unity of all things is the gift which is given through the life of contemplation. Benedict's Rule is a way to run on the path towards that vision of unified love. So he calls us in his Prologue to ‘run on the path of God's commandments with an inexpressible delight of love’.
The life of St Benedict was written by Pope St Gregory the Great. In his Dialogues he records the death of St Benedict. He died on 21 March 547 in the oratory or chapel of the monastery. After receiving communion he stood with his hands raised in prayer, and died supported by his brothers. So in death he was surrounded by the community, making him a latter-day Moses whose arms were held up by Joshua and Aaron so the battle could be won. After his death, the monastery was destroyed by the invading Lombards and the traditions tell us that some monks took Benedict's remains, and those of his sister, to the Abbey of St Benoit-sur-Loire, where his relics remain today.
The Way of Benedict
In his opening Prologue Benedict calls us to make an act of the will – to take a decision to follow the path of God's commandments. After a section on different types of monks he turns to the traits of a good abbot. He goes on with a fairly traditional outline of the steps of obedience and humility, then goes on to deal with the mundane matters of running the monastery. He tells the monks how to conduct the services in chapel, how to be disciplined, how to treat the physical goods of the monastery and how to live together in peace. But woven through the whole Rule is an awareness that the rules are simply training exercises. They are designed to channel the monk's life into an inner freedom and holiness. Throughout the Rule the three Benedictine vows of Stability, Obedience and Conversion of Life provide a driving force.
Benedict sees spiritual maturity as something which is attained obliquely. Enlightenment cannot be attained on its own like the reward for some sort of esoteric quest. Like happiness, enlightenment