Confinement at home, never mind in a small monastic one-room
hermitage, chafes, as we have all learned during the long period of
“stay-at-home.” It chafes most when home
is populated with other people, even people dearly loved, but it chafes the
solitary as well. However, God’s gifts
come in strange packages. Staying put
opens a door to wisdom, should we chose to go there. It invites us to renew our commitment to
listen, and listen with the ears of our heart, to Christ who is always our true
inward reality.
But St. Benedict’s building plan suggests that we will be
able really to hear if we clear out our ears by shutting the heart’s door on
all the voices that clamor for our attention: the TV with 24 hours a day of
pandemic news, the computer, the radio (unless music serves as a welcome wall
between the heart and the racket outside!), the phone, the shelf of books that
start by relaxing us and end by simply distracting us, and all the other intake
with which we so often protect ourselves from the dreaded possibility of a
silence in which there is nobody there.
There is never nobody there.
Jesus did say, as I often quote to myself as well as to you, “I am with
you always” (Matthew 20:). And he is
God’s word forever speaking us into being as in Genesis 1 and speaking to our
inmost being using the same powerful words of creative love that keep the world
spinning. As we all know, the
Benedictine habit of lectio divina and praying the liturgical Hours mediates
those words to us, but so does simply sitting still in God’s presence in
whatever attentiveness we can muster, however long or briefly.
I am currently reading Michael Casey’s daily homilies
collected into the book Balaam’s Donkey (Liturgical Press) in honor of his
fiftieth anniversary of priesthood.
Today’s selection is entitled GIGO, the acronym for “garbage in-garbage
out” familiar from early computer days. He warns that “The things we allow to
enter our thinking also have a role to play in shaping who we are and what we
will become”—that is the life of conversion to which all Benedictines, and not
only Benedictines aspire. St. Benedict
didn’t put it that way, but he understood it in building walls to keep his
monks from wandering all over the place physically and therefore
interiorly. It’s safe to stay at home –
at appropriate times and in appropriate ways, of course—in the inner room of
the heart. But only if we are not simply
taking refuge in selfishness, and only if we take care about what we carry with
us into that inward cell.
Whether it’s by means of newscasters or journalists bombarding us with
pandemic news or a relative’s gripes about all the pleasant things we no longer
have access to or our own inner collection of fears and complaints, we do can
cultivate deafness of heart without meaning to.
And that is sad, because, as Casey suggests, we really do become not
only what we eat but also what we listen to.
And that’s not only in times of pandemic!
Of course the desert monks roamed about, sometimes quite far
afield, to visit other monks, to talk with a spiritual father, to take their
handmade goods to town to sell them for money to buy bread for themselves but
more especially for the poor. Of course
St. Benedict’s monks traveled too, to get to the surrounding fields where they
worked the harvest and no doubt to run errands for various purposes. And of course, we all go out and about as
needed, even much less often under “stay-at-home” and now “safer-at-home”
regulations.
But that ancient monk’s advice, echoed by St. Benedict and
by his modern disciple, Michael Casey, it remains true that it’s really necessary
regularly to “stay in your cell, and your cell will teach you everything.” As long as you’re careful about who is in
there with you!
Copyright 2020 Abbey of St. Walburga
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