Benedictine Spirituality

Benedictine Life

“Listen carefully, my child to my instructions, and attend to them with the ear of your heart.”

Prologue to Rule of Benedict

Benedict of Nursia in the 6th century tried to follow a spiritual path by himself and realized he had to do this in community. From his awareness, we now have the Rule of Benedict, a way to find and follow God in community, balancing work, study, sleep, worship and prayers, and recreation. This rule has now been used for centuries in Benedictine monasteries. Today people are developing ways to follow a rule as they live in the secular world, still connecting in community with spiritual friends and with spiritual directors.

This prologue to the rule is my favorite part of the rule. “Listen with the ear of your heart.” This is the call to the spiritual life, a way to live in the world still connected to God. First, we are to listen, pay attention. We are to use the ear of our heart. We are to connect to something outside of ourselves, hearing and loving. We hear and listen and learn about love most evidently in community, outside of ourselves.

There are many outstanding books about the Rule of Benedict. I will share three favorites but would like to hear from others about the books that have been most helpful as you try to find your rule of life. The Rule of Benedict, A Spirituality for the 21th Century by Joan Chittister is used by The International Community of Hope, a training for lay pastoral care ministers that also immerses them in Benedictine spirituality. Joan Chittister writes a short meditation after each part of the rule and applies it to our everyday life.

Always We Begin Again, The Benedictine Way of Living is a pocket-sized small book that can be carried with you during the day written by Memphis lawyer, John McQuiston II, which is a modernization of Benedict’s Rule with a sample rule of life.

St. Benedict’s Toolbox is exactly what the author, Jane Tomaine, calls it in her subtitle, The Nuts and Bolts of Everyday Benedictine Living.

All three books are especially good to read together in community, learning and supporting each other.

The Daughters of the King at my previous church and now at St. Mark’s are reading St. Benedict’s Toolbox together. Dennis Campbell, my daughter’s husband and an Episcopal priest, reminds me that The Book of Common Prayer is also steeped in Benedictine spirituality!

Joanna joannaseibert.com

The Clark Fork River and Love

The Clark Fork River and Love

“And so it is those we live with and should know who elude us, but we can still love them. We can love completely without complete understanding.” Norman Maclean, A River Runs Through It. University of Chicago Press.1976.

This past summer we were in Missoula, Montana, visiting our daughter, Joanna, and her husband, Dennis, with our oldest grandson, Mac, and his dad, John. Our hotel is right, I mean directly on the banks of Clark Fork, and the river is rapidly in real time running by our small porch on the first floor. We are mesmerized by watching the high-speed water, but it is the sound of the racing river that truly runs through us. It calms. It soothes. In its orchestral movement, it is peaceful. It sounds like a wind instrument, perhaps a distant native American flute. Sometimes it has the “Om” sound that is chanted in yoga and eastern meditation. We begin to know the stillness of sitting or standing and just observing the wonder of something too magnificent for words go by. We can become so relaxed that we fall asleep. Water, moving or still, has healing powers that we cannot understand.

Today we hear from our daughter that all of this is covered with snow, but I know the sound of the Clark Fork is still mesmerizing lives.

I have watched Robert Redford’s movie, A River Runs Through It with all of our children and most of our grandchildren. We can often quote lines in the movie and answer back the responses to each other. If you have not read the book or seen the movie, stop now because I am going to spoil it for you.

The story is about the Maclean family, a father and two sons, Norman and Paul, growing up fly-fishing in Missoula, Montana. The words quoted today are near the end of the movie preached in one of the father’s last sermons. I could almost hear Norman’s father when we rode by that same brick Presbyterian church last summer on the way to get ice cream. The father is indirectly talking about Norman’s younger brother, Paul, who died an early traumatic death related to his addictions.

As I watch and listen beside the Clark Fork where the Macleans lived and loved a century ago, I think also of those I could not understand but wanted to love completely. My prayers today are to keep trying to hear these words by Norman’s father about them. Of course. there are also those I could not understand and never even wanted to consider loving the least bit, much less completely. I pray a little more to see them in a new light.

Loving without understanding may be on the path to unconditional love, God’s love. Om.

Joanna joannaseibert.com

See A Daily Spiritual Rx for Lent and Easter on Amazon or contact Joanna about the new book.

Baptism

Baptism

“This dying and rising, this crossing over from death to life which happens at baptism, is not a one-off thing – but it is to be our daily vesture as Christians.” Br. Geoffrey Tristram, Society of Saint John the Evangelist, SSJE.org, “Brother Give us a word,” Daily Email. August 29, 2018, a daily email sent to friends and followers of the Society of Saint John the Evangelist, a religious order for men in the Episcopal/Anglican Church. www.ssje.org,.

If we were baptized in a river or by full immersion, we might better understand this well-known theological concept of baptism as a dying and rebirth and compare it to our life in the world. There is something memorable about going totally under water in the arms of someone else, totally surrendering and wondering for a brief second if we will come back up. When we do have our heads above water, we cannot help but look around, shake our head of dripping hair and give thanks for being alive, a new beginning, a new start, a new you. For some reason we see the world a little clearer. Some of the fog is gone.

Each day a little of us certainly dies physically. Each day we try to learn a little more about surrender. My prayer is that each day a little of my character defects die or are chipped away. When that happens, I do indeed know resurrection, a new life, a life of peace and love and joy. But as so often happens, pieces of those character defects or sins seem to come right back like magnets to places in our mind and body and spirit where they so comfortably lived at one time. Sometimes they come back like some fiery ugly dragon from some place inside of us that we never knew existed, and we end up having to make more apologies than we did in the past.

Baptism in our tradition is a onetime thing, but dying and resurrection are a daily, sometimes hourly event. The concept that at baptism we see dying and resurrection is still important. I love Br. Geoffrey’s use of the word, vesture, meaning a garment that covers us, like a vestment. He is offering to us the opportunity to try to imagine wearing our baptism like a vestment throughout the day. An amazing concept!

As we watch infants, toddlers, youth, and adults being baptized, we might imagine their putting on a vestment to cover them throughout eternal life as a promise that they are marked as God’s own forever, and God is always with them in each dying and each resurrection in their lives. We hold on to this sacrament as an outward and visible both sign and symbol of our life in and with Christ in the world.

There are parts of us that are dying, but there are parts of us that need dying, and God offers resurrection to us daily at each death on both sides of the veil.

Joanna. joannaseibert