The life of St Benedict revolves around two recurring themes, being in love and being on the move.
As a young man, Benedict fell in love with learning. To follow his love, he left his family and the familiar surroundings of Nurcia and went to seek out that learning in the schools of Rome. The decaying city of Rome proved a disappointment for Benedict, but during this time, he slowly nurtured a new love, the love of righteousness. Eventually this love drove him out of Rome in a search for solitude, which he found in a cave near Subiaco looking down on the ruins of the Emperor Nero’s villa, a constant reminder of the decaying ancient world all around him.
His years of solitude fostered the growth of a third love, a love of intimacy. This intimacy with God led him to abandon the austere solitary life as followers began flocking around him. He formed them into small communities of twelve monks each and later, after much torment, found himself on the move one last time to Monte Cassino, where he established his largest community and finally wrote his Rule for monks.
That Rule opens with famous words taken from the Book of Proverbs, ‘Listen my son to the precepts of the Master…’ The Rule is the fruit of Benedict’s love and his journey. He did not come up with the precepts of his monastic Rule in one sitting, but in one lifetime. The Rule speaks from Benedict’s own monastic journey of seeking and loving God. It is full of learning, the fruits of years spent in solitude with God, lessons learned from leading a community of monks and the wisdom and discretion of old age. It charts a long journey encompassing many new beginnings. Benedict can truly say with St Peter “Lord, we have left everything to follow you”.
Benedict insists that the love of Christ must come before all else, finding expression within the dynamics of community life in the love of others, where mutual obedience and care in all humility are live out, as described in the Acts of the Apostles.
Today, we face the challenge of being faithful to that love of Christ while adjusting to a fast-evolving world. We are living with a global pandemic and the challenges of a rapidly changing society. What does it mean for us to constantly love and leave behind the familiar and our personal preferences for the sake of this love? No matter how effective former ways may have been, we are urged to embrace the new ways that God invites us into: new ways of praying, of working, of relating with one another, of using the earth’s resources; but always for the sake of the love of Christ. For only then, does leaving the familiar behind and embracing the newness of life make sense.
Benedict has shown us the way. He felt the urge to leave behind the familiar in the pursuit of this love. He had the strength and courage to do so only because he loved God first. This is the key for all of us if we truly yearn for life and desire to see good days.
10th July 2021
Dear Friend,
On 24th October 1964, Pope Paul VI wrote as follows about St Benedict,
When darkness seemed to be spreading over Europe after the fall of the Roman empire, he brought the light of dawn to shine upon this continent. For with the cross, the book and the plough, Christian civilization was carried, principally through him and his disciples, to the peoples who lived in those lands which stretch from the Mediterranean to Scandinavia, and from Ireland to Poland.
With the cross, that is, the Law of Christ, he strengthened and developed the institutions of private and social life. Through the “Work of God,” that is, through the careful and assiduous conduct of prayer, he taught that divine worship was of the greatest importance in the social order…
With the book, that is, with the culture of the mind, this venerable patriarch from whom so many monasteries have drawn their name and their spirit, spread his doctrine through the old classics of literature and the liberal arts, preserved and passed on to posterity by them with so much care.
And lastly, with the plough, that is, through agriculture, he changed the waste and desert lands into orchards and delightful gardens; and joining work with prayer in the spirit of those words, ora et labora, he restored the dignity of human labour.
As we celebrate his feast on 11th July, we pray for our own country and for the continent of Europe, for peace and for prosperity, for an end to this pandemic and for health. Above all, we pray that the peoples of Europe will continue to treasure the message of St Benedict, the cross, the book and the plough: love of God, love of true learning and all that is best in human culture, art and literature, and love for God’s beautiful creation that has been gifted to us.
With every blessing
Brendan Coffey OSB, Abbot of Glenstal
It is our pleasure to share with you, friends, benefactors, parents, students, colleagues and visitors, something of the variety and richness of life here in Glenstal Abbey.
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14th Sunday B
The expression familiarity breeds contempt is as old as the hills. We find it in works ranging from Aesop’s fable of ‘The fox and the lion’, to the tale of Melibee in the Canterbury Tales, where Chaucer says, over-greet hoomlynesse (or familiarity) engendreth dispreisynge (engenders contempt). We all know from experience what the reality of this expression can mean in our lives. We get used to people and assume we know them. We take them for granted and can be blind to their good qualities. We become dismissive and are quick to find fault. We lose a sense of wonder.
In today’s gospel we hear of Jesus’ return to his home village after a period of preaching and working miracles around Galilee. No doubt news of his activities found its way back to Nazareth and on the Sabbath he is invited to teach in the local synagogue. Initially the people are astonished and they recognize in Jesus something out of the ordinary. Where did this man get all this, they ask, his wisdom and his power to work mighty deeds? We don’t know what Jesus said but the initial astonishment quickly sours and gives way to hostility and rejection. Who does he think he is? We know him. He grew up among us. He is just the local carpenter. We know his family. He is no different from us. How mistaken they are! Yes, familiarity breeds not just contempt but unbelief. Jesus says as much when he tells them, ‘a prophet is not without honour except in his native place and among his own kin and in his own house.’ And he is taken aback at their lack of faith.
Today’s gospel suggest that a great obstacle to faith is familiarity, hoomlynesse: a refusal to believe that God’s presence could possibly come to us in so familiar a form as the person next door; a resistance to recognise that God might have sent us a prophet in someone who, to our eyes, does not quite fit the bill. We can be like the locals of Nazareth who had fixed ideas as to when and where and how the Messiah should come to Israel. The local carpenter, the son of Mary, did not measure up. And they really missed out.
In today’s second reading St Paul draws our attention to another type of prophet that God sends into our midst, one to which we also turn a blind eye and even ask him to take away. Paul calls it ‘a thorn in the flesh’. All sorts of suggestions have been made as to the nature of this thorn in the flesh of the Apostle but that is not the point. For Paul it was the discovery that this thorn, the abiding personal weakness that he shunned, could be a channel of God’s grace, an opening onto the mystery of the cross of Christ. ‘I will all the more gladly boast of my weaknesses, that the power of Christ may rest on me.’ Shutting the door will not do, he tells us, for the God who came to us in the flesh meets us there in the flesh of our experience, all of it, all of our self and our world.
Growth in the Spirit almost always shows itself in the capacity to recognise Christ more and more in the ordinary, the everyday. The great saints never ceased being filled with wonder at the mysterious presence of God. ‘The Word became flesh’ not only means that the Son of God became a human being, but that he took human form in a town as ordinary and insignificant and out of the way as Nazareth. Can anything good come out of Nazareth? For sure, it can! But can we identify the Nazareth in our own selves, in our families, in our community and open the door to the Heaven in ordinarie that is in the place we would least expect it to be?
Fr Senan OSB
In this final episode, Father Martin talks about Glenstal Abbey School and how the rhythm, culture and traditions of the monastery give a distinctive shape to school life: https://youtu.be/8a2RhiKmkMs
Our guestmaster, Father Christopher, explains the place of hospitality in our monastic life according to Saint Benedict’s command to receive guests like Christ Himself: https://youtu.be/hJN_Ir2w3nw