Roman society knew the cost of war, the foolishness of debauchery, the stifling engorgement of excess on every level. Benedict’s simple rule of life became a template for living, authentic to the core and a guide to the highest of spiritual heights through the ages. Yet always simple. Always genuine. Always truly human.
This book takes us to the heart of life—our own as well as the ideas of others. Judith Valente gives us the opportunity to plot our own lives and struggles against that of an ancient spirituality that has been the basis of life for thousands in the last fifteen centuries and is a torch for many still.
It is a book worth reading. Better yet, it is a book worth thinking about.
—JOAN CHITTISTER, OSB, AUTHOR OF THE RULE OF BENEDICT
Is there anyone here who yearns for life and desires to see good days?
—FROM THE PROLOGUE TO THE RULE OF ST. BENEDICT
This is a book about living. Not about surviving, but living a balanced, meaningful, and attentive life. It is like a traveler’s trunk that contains all the wisdom I wish I had acquired earlier in my life and seek now to pass on.
I can’t take credit for originating these ideas. They come from the mind of a teacher who lived more than fifteen hundred years ago. He originally wrote his guide, or Rule, for people living in a monastic community. Monasteries might seem like an unlikely source of wisdom for those of us living in the age of Instagram. And yet, this slender text has proved indispensable to people throughout the centuries seeking to live a saner, more peaceful life outside of a monastery. For me—a working journalist, an often overburdened professional, and a modern married woman—it has been a constant companion, never far from my work desk or nightstand.
The Rule of St. Benedict emerged from an era when a great civilization was under threat from violent outside forces. The economy favored the wealthy. Social norms were changing, and political leaders lacked the public’s trust. Many blamed their anxiety on government, foreigners, or those of a different religion or race. Sound like the nightly news? Welcome to Rome in the 6th century.
St. Benedict was not a priest or a religious official. He was, however, a leader—a young man disillusioned with the conflict, greed, injustice, and lack of compassion he saw around him. He believed the gospels offered a wiser, more consequential way to live. He called himself and his followers “monks,” from the Greek monos, meaning one. It signaled they had one goal, to seek God and forge a new kind of society with single-minded devotion. The society Benedict and his monks constructed rested firmly on counter-cultural pillars.
Buffeted by war, Benedict didn’t amass an army. He sought to build community. Instead of the false security of personal wealth, he endorsed the freedom of simplicity. His solution to daily threats of violence was to counsel his monks to sleep without their knives. To cope with the chaos around him, he embraced silence. He said: Replace grumbling with a sense of gratitude. Start each day with praise. Seek the common good and your own well-being will follow.
Community. Simplicity. Humility. Hospitality. Gratitude. Praise. These are the pillars of Benedictine spirituality. These are the things that matter. This is perhaps what we’ve forgotten.
Often it feels as though a genie of discord has escaped into the very air we breathe, liberating us to be our worst selves. We just have to read the news. A group of young men convene near the US White House, chanting “Heil victory, Heil our people,” and raise the fisted Nazi salute. African-American middle school students are greeted with shouts of “Go back to Africa.” Strangers pull off the head scarves of Muslim women out shopping. Gay men hear taunts of “faggot” in the street. White supremacists bearing guns, clubs, and torches march in the center of American cities.
The Rule of St. Benedict invites an alternative vision. It is summed up in a single line from one of the shortest chapters in The Rule: “The Good Zeal of Monastics.” Try to be the first to show respect to the other, supporting with the greatest patience one another’s weaknesses of body or behavior. This is the good St. Benedict says we are called to model. He asks us to nurture it zealously, with fervent love.
One of the most critically acclaimed fantasy films in recent years was a piece of science fiction called The Arrival. It is the story of beings from outer space who arrive on earth, igniting a wildfire of fear across the planet. Their language is unlike anything spoken or written, and it includes a unique perception of time. An expert linguist is tapped to initiate contact. If she cannot draw out the visitors’ true intentions, the nations of the world will pool their weaponry and launch an all-out assault.
To show her own peaceful motives, the linguist enters the spacecraft, and at considerable risk to herself, removes her biohazard suit. She approaches the strange, multi-limbed creatures with palms open and outstretched. Her body language demonstrates she isn’t there to attack. Slowly, by immersing herself in the aliens’ language, she uncovers their purpose. Earth escapes an interplanetary disaster, not by superior weaponry or even acts of daring, but by bravely communicating with those we don’t at first understand. Success through empathy. In many ways, the film mirrors the parallel society the Benedictine Rule calls us to forge. One where the ability to listen, to communicate, and ultimately to understand delivers us from self-destruction.
“Who will dwell in your tent, O God? Who will find rest in your holy mountain? (Ps 15:1) …” “Those who walk without blemish and are just in all dealings; who speak truth from the heart and have not practiced deceit; who have not wronged another in any way, nor listened to slander against a neighbor.” (Ps 15:2–3)
—FROM THE PROLOGUE
The Benedictine Rule is as much a text for the spiritual beginner as it is for the spiritually mature. Some have described it as a guidepost. I like to think of it as a railing I can grab onto to steady myself when I encounter a dark, uncertain path. My own journey toward The Rule was hardly a direct route. A friend who is a Presbyterian minister recommended the text to me at a time when I had just moved back to the US from Europe and was embarking on a new phase of my writing career. He thought it might satisfy some of the spiritual unrest I was experiencing over whether I was doing enough with my life.
I thought it contained some lovely and thought-provoking passages. Listen with the ear of the heart … Day by day, remind yourself you are going to die. Hour by hour, keep careful watch over all you do … Your way of acting must be different from the world’s way. There was also enough in the text that was strange and puzzling to prompt me to set it aside for nearly a decade. It wasn’t until I saw The Rule lived in the daily context of a contemporary Benedictine monastery that I realized: here was the path I had been seeking.
Atchison, Kansas, is a city I had never thought about, much less visited, before I received an invitation to give a talk on Touching the Sacred through Poetry at the retreat center of Mount St. Scholastica, one of Atchison’s two Benedictine monasteries. The offer came at a pivotal time for me, both professionally and personally. I had been married only two years. While my marriage was a blessing, I struggled as a second wife to forge a relationship with my two adult stepdaughters.
My first book, Twenty Poems to Nourish the Soul, had just come out, and that was another gift. But it, too, came with stresses. I began receiving requests from across the country to lead poetry workshops and retreats on weekends, all the while working my day job at the time as a contributing correspondent for PBS-TV and Chicago Public Radio. I arrived at Mount St. Scholastica on a Saturday night exhausted—physically, mentally, and emotionally.