Saturday, July 11, 2020, Memorial of Saint Benedict, Abbot         (today’s lectionary)
Wisdom on a post-it note
Tom and I sat together eating dinner before our Transforming Community’s last retreat in January. Huge windows encircled the Q Center dining room, and snowy hills surrounded us. We ate shrimp and prime rib and sushi and flourless chocolate cake.
With some guilt, we savored the culinary delights of every meal at the Q Center in St. Charles, Illinois. We came to these retreats to fast and pray. Well … pray. The theme this weekend would be crafting our own personal “rule of life.”
St. Benedict coined this phrase 1700 years ago. He wrote the “Rule” which every monastery in Europe adopted during the next millennium. As I read it today, much of the language seems invasive and alien, but when interpreted by a modern Benedictine like Joan Chittister, it comes back to life. At the Abbey of Gethsemani, the Trappist monastery in northern Kentucky where Father Louis, aka Thomas Merton, spent twenty-seven years of his life, Benedict’s words are etched above the guest house door:
Let all guests that come be received like Christ.
Margaret and I have been to Gethsemani twice and to the Benedictine Saint Meinrad monastery in southern Indiana several more times. Saint Meinrad, south of I-64 and on central time, offers a prayer service at 5 pm. A few miles away the Sisters of Saint Benedict at Ferdinand, north of I-64 on eastern time, does the same. One day we prayed at Ferdinand, and then hurried back south and prayed at Saint Meinrad. Joshua is not the only one who stopped the sun.
One afternoon during a blinding summer thunderstorm, we visited Our Lady of Grace, a monastery planted by the Sisters of St. Benedict in Indianapolis. Making our drenched way into the lobby we were met by a “woman religious,” who told spell-binding stories and welcomed us in every way she knew. A former nurse, now she was researching and writing the history of her order. She made sure we felt “received like Christ.”
What did Tom say about his rule of life? “I have thrown out so many longer versions, and now my rule of life fits on a post-it note.” I don’t know what he wrote on that post-it note, but I took his idea to heart and wrote my own new and longest-so-far-lasting rule:
Welcome all, and read, write, listen, pray, every day.
I think St. Benedict would be pleased. If he wrote haikus, instead of long paragraphs of old prose, he might write pretty much the same thing.
           (Isaiah 6, Psalm 93, 1 Peter 4, Matthew 10)
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