Referring back to the scripture Sr. Genevieve started with
at the beginning,
“If you make my word your home, you will truly be my
disciples, and you will know the truth, and the truth will make you free.”
(Jerusalem Bible),
She focused on the second section – You will truly be my
disciples. What is a disciple? A student, a learner,
someone who wants to put into practice what their teacher models or
explains. This is the kind of student who in Jesus’ day, for
example, spent the day wandering around with the teacher, listening and looking
and often asking questions; “That doesn’t make any sense to me, what are you
talking about? What are you doing?” And thank God they do
that, because they are often our questions, and somebody asks them for us so we
can take a look at those.
So in Jesus’ day one became a disciple by hanging around
with the teacher and watching what the teacher does as well as listening. And
now, also, we become disciples by reading and the various forms of verbal input
by which we are exposed to the scripture. “So if you make my word
your home, you will hang out there and you will become my disciple.” Because
basically the Lord is saying that he hangs out there too, and “You will get to
know me better, maybe the parts of me that make you really uncomfortable, maybe
the parts that challenge you to grow further”. So all Christians are
disciples, all Benedictines are, by definition, disciples. So we
want to hang out with our teacher any way we can. There are other
ways of hanging out, there are other ways of praying. But if we make
the word our home, we gradually become disciples without even noticing what’s
happening. And the time we notice it is when we suddenly find
ourselves in a situation behaving differently than we usually do.
Transformation is a key word in Benedictine terminology, we
refer to Conversatio, which means change. And we will talk about
that at some point. But it’s particularly transformation, which
isn’t dropping the old person and taking on a new one. It is having
the old person gradually grow into a new person by making the word our home and
hanging out there.
And very particularly in the New Testament we find that
becoming a disciple requires that we vote with our feet, that we do
something. In Matthew 7:24, Jesus says “everyone who listens to
these words of mine, and acts on them will be like a wise man who built his
house on rock.” So it isn’t good enough to just listen to the word,
you have to live it.
As you know that the Rule of Benedict opens with the word
“Listen”. But as you read through the first paragraph of the
prologue, the first line of the prologue is “Listen carefully my son to the
master’s instructions, and attend to them with the ear of your heart. This
is advice from a father who loves you” – and the master or the father who loves
you can be either Benedict, himself, or Christ – he makes that clear. “Welcome
it and faithfully put it into practice.” Welcoming it is not
enough. You have to do what it says. You have to act
according to what you discover from watching Christ or listening to
Christ. And he even calls that the labor of
obedience. Benedict is no fool. He knows it’s not easy,
necessarily. It’s work.
But unless the word bears fruit in how we are, how we act,
what we think, what we do, then we are really just dilatants dabbling in this
book, like a mystery novel or whatever. In the letter of James,
later in the New Testament, we have another expression of that. “Be doers
of the word and not hearers only, deluding yourselves.” So reading
the Bible and having pious feelings about it can be a way of deluding
ourselves. I imagine I am growing holy because, Look, I have all
these nice feelings. Which probably means you’re not doing it very
regularly anyway. But I have these lovely feelings and I go away and
I am unchanged. That’s delusion. We have to be doers of
the word, not hearers only. Now that’s happens gradually; we don’t
always see it happening because we don’t spend our entire life taking our
spiritual temperature every 10 minutes and seeing how we are doing. But
gradually we discover ourselves being a little different.
Copyright Abbey of St. Walburga 2013
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