As all of us Benedictine, oblates or vowed monastics, could
probably recite in our sleep, St. Benedict opens the Rule we aspire to live by
with a double command: “Listen…with the
ears of your heart” and “put it into action.” It’s simple: listen to it, then
do it! But St. Benedict is hardly one to advocate acting on impulse. Nor does he intend to create an army of
robots. So something has to happen
between listening and doing.
The tradition of lectio divina (prayerful reading of
Scripture), which St. Benedict also mandated for us without actually using the
term, supplies the answer. You know the
pattern: (1) Listen (read); (2) ponder
in conversation with God (meditate; pray); (3) act on what you’ve heard. But this pattern is not restricted to praying
with Scripture. The monastic tradition
speaks of 3 “texts” we can read, ponder, and act on: the Scriptures of course; nature (this
contribution by St. Anthony the Great refers to the mountains or the trees in
the backyard, but can also be
interpreted as the human nature in those around us, of which he was himself a gifted
reader); and the “pages” of our daily
life’s experience. This is what St.
Benedict means when he talks about seeking God in all things and in all
people. The regular practice of this
extended version of lectio creates what I call the lectio mindset, because it
is not just something we do at selected times but the way we interact with all
of reality.
This mindset presumes, as St. Benedict presumed, and as
Jesus taught in the gospel, that reality comes in layers. There is the busy surface that enchants or
annoys or simply absorbs in the business of everyday living. But on this slick surface, St. Benedict might
have said, you slip and slide and go no deeper into the underlying conversation
for which our speaking God made us. That
requires plunging through the surface, sometimes with great effort, to get to
the deeper places of reality where God is busy creating, transforming,
enlivening all that is and inviting us to take part in the work.
This image suggests a two layer world, or maybe a three
layer one if we assign God a separate place above and beyond us, as we often do
but as St. Benedict never did. However, reality
is not a layer cake, with the chocolate carefully separated from the strawberry
by a thick layer of vanilla frosting you could drown in. The layered reality St. Benedict understood
is intensely interactive: heaven and earth arein constant conversation as
both God and God’s created reality work together toward a future we cannot
even imagine, so the Bible simply calls it “a new heaven and a new earth.” What that might look like, we can only guess.
Really to live in this layered and interactive reality, we
need to pray as St. John of the Cross would suggest (even though he wasn’t a
Benedictine!): “We must … dig deeply in Christ.
He is like a rich mine with many pockets containing treasures; however
deep we dig, we will never find their end or their limit. Indeed, in every pocket new seams of fresh
riches are found on all sides” (see The Liturgy of the Hours, Office of
Readings, December 14). Here, it seems,
is the place to which we must go between hearing and doing: Christ, the Wisdom
of God, embedded in and speaking throughout the Scriptures and all reality.
So to get from the listening to the doing, let us put on our
miner’s helmets, turn on the brightest light they offer, and go digging into
all the nooks and crannies life offers to see what God has hidden there for
us. Thus do we honor the fact that life,
like a mine, is seamed with gold. Or, as I prefer to think, seamed with light,
the Light of the world!
