The Lord waits for us daily to translate into action his holy teachings …
Let us set out on this way with the Gospel for our guide …
We will never arrive unless we run there by doing good deeds …
Are you hastening toward your heavenly home? …
And one of my favorite lines in all of The Rule:
Run while you have the light of life, that the darkness of death may not overtake you.
Yearn. Love. Pray. Renounce. Respect. Live. All words that pop up early on in The Rule.
Most mornings, I rise around 4 A.M. to the sound of a thwack against our front door. It is the signature of Lauren or Junie, one of our two paper carriers, carrying out a line of work that one day soon will likely go the way of the milkman, the TV repairman, and the doctor who made house calls. Sometimes I am swift enough and awake enough to open the door and give one or the other a greeting. That never fails to startle them, accustomed as they are to seeing only dark and silent houses at that hour of the morning. I used to just scoop up the New York Times and dash back inside. But lately I’ve taken to lingering outside for a few minutes. I survey our front yard, the other houses on the block, and the sky at that moment when the birds begin their morning calls. The moon is still stationed overhead, and daylight is starting to creep onto the horizon.
I witness some strange and wonderful sights. Once it was a skunk exiting from between two bushes. It must have been a polite skunk, as I don’t recall it leaving behind its traditional calling card. Often there are rabbits romping across the grass. They become quite still at my arrival, as if they are imitating statues. Other days, a snake or a slug on the front step. One morning I will never forget, I happened to look up just as a shooting star streaked across the sky. I felt so lucky to have been watching at that precise moment. I should say here that our house isn’t in the middle of some prairie. It sits in the heart of a university town, so a shooting star or undomesticated animal isn’t something you are likely to see. Unless, of course, you’re paying attention.
On my first visit to the Abbey of Gethsemani in Kentucky, I wanted to savor the entire experience. I was determined to wake up in time for the 3:15 A.M. Vigils, the first prayers of the day. My room wasn’t in the regular retreatant’s quarters attached to the abbey, but rather on top of a hill overlooking the monastery in what the monks call the Family Guest House. I had to walk about five minutes down the hill to get to the abbey church. One morning I stepped outside my room before dawn and saw an amazing sight. The entire southern edge of the sky was awash in stars. I felt as if I could step inside this doorway of starlight. One of the monks, Brother Paul Quenon, told me later I had been looking into the Milky Way. He pointed to a solitary, bright star suspended in an opposite direction—the planet Venus. Suddenly the reason for waking up that early acquired a whole new dimension. The candlelit prayers in the abbey chapel and the chanting of the Psalms provide a wonderful, soulful entry to the day. So do the magical sights you can behold at that time of morning when much of the world is still asleep.
The 3rd- and 4th-century monks who lived in the desert considered the silence of the night a valuable teacher. Night reminds us that time is passing. Our lives, like days, are finite. Antony, one of the most revered of the desert monks, advised, “Each day when we arise, let’s assume we won’t live until nightfall. And at night, when going to sleep, let’s assume we won’t awaken.” His wasn’t a morbid fascination with death, but a reality check. We have a limited amount of days in which to live, so we might as well wake up and act now. There is important work to do.
If you desire true and eternal life, “keep your tongue free from vicious talk, your lips free from all deceit; turn away from evil and let peace be your quest and aim.” (Ps 34: 14–15).
—FROM THE PROLOGUE
For Benedict, awakening our senses to our physical surroundings is the natural prelude to awakening the heart. In high school, I had a wonderful teacher for freshman English named Margaret Henley. Miss Henley was something of an aspiring poet, as well as the faculty advisor for the school literary magazine and thus a group of us girls who fancied ourselves emerging writers. All writers, she would say, begin as observers. She challenged us one day to recall the eye color of the bus driver who took us to school that morning. I should have known this. I knew the driver’s name. He was a regular along my route. He had even taped a piece of cardboard onto the corner of the bus’s front window that said, scrawled in sparkle ink, “Wishing You A Good Day, Your Driver Sam.” But the color of Sam’s eyes? I could only guess. Blue?
Ever since that day in class, I’ve tried to not only notice, but also truly observe the people I pass in the street, the grocery store, or sit next to on the bus—not to mention the people I interview as a journalist. Still, I fall down on the job. As a young reporter for the Dallas Times Herald, I was sent to write about a man who, over the years, had portrayed Santa for something like ten thousand children. He was a jovial fellow, just about the right size for Santa, with a seemingly inexhaustible well of patience. He appeared to experience deep joy in being around children. He spoke lovingly of his own grown children.
At about eight o’clock that Christmas Eve, the phone rang at my home. It was Joe, the man who played Santa. He was in tears. He told me how much he appreciated the article I had written about him. He thanked me for being so kind to him. Because of my kindness, he wanted me to know it was all a faade. He in fact hated Christmas. His wife had divorced him. His children didn’t talk to him. Every Christmas, he found himself alone. In fact, all the while he was volunteering at hospitals, stores, and children’s parties as Santa, he had been living out of his car because he couldn’t afford an apartment. He said it was all he could do to not think about killing himself as he took off his red Santa suit for the last time of the season.
Why hadn’t I seen any of this coming? How could I, a trained observer, have missed picking up on even an inkling of this man’s pain? I called my parents and told them I’d be late coming over to their home for Christmas Eve dinner. With a friend, I drove over to the part of town where Joe was sitting in his broken down car on that cold December night. We tried to convince him to come back with us to my parent’s house for a meal. He didn’t want to come, but thanked us for spending time with him. You could say my best gift that Christmas Eve was that I woke up.
What is not possible to us by nature, let us ask the Holy One to supply with the help of grace.
—FROM THE PROLOGUE
In his autobiography, Chronicles, singer-songwriter Bob Dylan says one of the greatest influences on his life was his maternal grandmother. She once told him something he never forgot: “Everyone you’ll ever meet is fighting a hard battle.” Joe is a prime example. To truly see Joe, I first had to break out of the tomb of my own self-absorption. I had to climb out from my own battleground so I could see someone else’s “hard battle.”
Joe’s story has a somewhat happy ending. About a year later, I ran into him. He was dressed in a business suit and said that with the help of a social service agency, he was able to scrape together enough money to begin making belts and other leather goods for sale. The business wasn’t exactly booming, but he had customers among the people he met over the many years he had played Santa. St. Benedict asks us to awaken to the whisper of the sacred in our daily lives. And then he asks more. He asks that we wake up to the people around us—to truly see them. In a beautiful scene in the musical version of The Bridges of Madison County, the main character at one point asks her lover to look deeply at her hands, her mouth, her shoulders. She says, “talk to me, like there’s something to say.” One of the greatest gifts we can give to others is to let them know they are seen and heard.
The Benedictine Abbot Jerome Kodell writes about partaking of “the sacrament of the present moment.” That is what I felt I was doing that Christmas Eve