Today Benedictines celebrate the feast of St. Scholastica, St. Benedict’s twin sister. Our only record of her is found The Dialogues by Pope St. Gregory the Great ( ). There we read the story of their last meeting, and quite an entertaining one it is, especially for those of us who have siblings! The twins were accustomed to meet once a year at a place near the gate of St. Benedict’s monastery. With some of Benedict’s disciples, they spent the whole day praying together and discussing “holy things.” When evening came, they had supper together and went on with their spiritual conversation till it grew late.
St. Benedict must started looking at what would have been his watch in later times, though St. Gregory does not say. St. Scholastica evidently knew what he was thinking and pleaded with him not to leave her but to continue their conversation until morning. St. Benedict was horrified! “Sister,” he said, “what are you saying? I simply cannot stay outside my cell.” (He was, after all, the great western monastic rule maker!) His sister didn’t argue. She simply joined her hands on the table, put her head down, and prayed, apparently along the lines of, “O God, do something!”.
And what an answer she got! “There were such brilliant flashes of lightning, such great peals of thunder and such a heavy downpour of rain that neither Benedict nor his brethren could stir across the threshold of the place where they had been seated.” She didn’t say, “so there!” but she might have been thinking it! Again her brother was horrified: “May God forgive you, sister. What have you done?” (His lack of logic tickles me—the God he is asking to forgive his sister, who actually did nothing but pray, is the God who sent the storm!) St. Scholastica spells it out clearly for him: “Well,” she answered, “I asked you and you would not listen; so I asked my God and he did listen.”
This is what I call “the Scholastic strategy.” If you are caught in a dilemma and are seeking a God-inspired solution, and the people around you dig in their heels and refuse to cooperate, just ask God. I find this especially helpful when I catch myself brooding over all the things I could say to get others to do what I think would be the right thing and rehearsing the necessary conversations in my head—only to realize that the only one who has a biblical right to brood over challenges and resolve them is the Spirit of God (see Genesis 1:1). This is a development of a sort of mantra I used to recite to myself often: “I am not the Messiah. I only “work for him!” Unfortunately I was often apt not to listen to myself, but “the Scholastica strategy takes it out of my (non-messianic) hands and puts the responsibility where it belongs: in God’s ear. And, of course, God sees much farther and deeper into matters than I ever could.
Try it sometime. You might like it! I hope even St. Benedict went home chuckling at the two of them.
