Excerpt from
Seeking God
The Way of St. Benedict
Esther de Waal; Foreword by Kathleen Norris
© The Order of St. Benedict, Inc., Collegeville, Minnesota. All rights reserved. No part of this may be reproduced by any means, without the written permission of The Liturgical Press, Collegeville, Minnesota 56321.

Contents
    Foreword

    Preface

    I St. Benedict

    II The Invitation

    III Listening

    IV Stability

    V Change

    VI Balance

    VII Material Things

    VIII  People

    IX Authority

    X Praying

    Notes on Further Reading

From the Foreword
by Kathleen Norris

When Seeking God came into my life, given to me by a Benedictine monk, it was an answered prayer. It helped me to see that the wisdom of St. Benedict is not just for Catholics, or even monastics, but for anyone who wishes, in Benedict’s words, to take the gospels as guide. And in providing an invaluable aid to interpreting a sixth-century monastic rule for life in the modern world, Esther de Waal has made delightful connections that have lasting resonance for me. Her chapter on listening contains the insight that both liturgy and the nursing home allow for a different, holier kind of time, in which the repeating of story might be honored and valued. Perhaps it is only because we are always in such an ungodly hurry that we stereotype both church and nursing home as boring and bleak. In the chapter entitled "People" de Waal deflates our culture’s preoccupation with sex by boldly asserting that the way a parent has treated a child in ordinary, daily encounters over the years—dressing, undressing, bathing, running errands—will teach more about the holy dignity of the body than any lecture on "sex education" inflicted during adolescence.

Benedictine spirituality, de Waal reminds us, is grounded in the idea that God’s presence is everywhere, and that it is our job to seek it out, remembering that the material and the spiritual are not distinct and separate realms, but that even our most ordinary manual work "is to be a constant reminder of the reality of the Incarnation." To live in the holistic manner envisioned by St. Benedict, de Waal says, is to live knowing that "God does not demand the unusual, spectacular, the heroic," but rather "that I do the most ordinary, often dreary and humdrum things that face me each day with a loving openness that will allow them to become my own immediate way to God." This is the monastic way, in the traditions of both Christianity and Buddhism, yet it is also a way that is open to anyone.

Preface
"I speak to you, whoever you may be." That small phrase from the Rule of St. Benedict is wonderfully accurate, and perhaps more true today than ever before. That great Benedictine scholar Dom David Knowles was fond of quoting a quaint medieval saying about the Rule: "A lamb can bathe in it without drowning, while an elephant can swim in it." For undoubtedly the Rule remains one of the great religious classics—never outmoded, always new, possessing "a dynamism capable of inspiring the lives of those who in every age approach it prayerfully and openly." Fr. Lawrence Freeman, the Benedictine monk widely known for his work in promoting the meditational practice associated with John Main, tells us quite simply that the Rule is "the most decisive document for Christian living after the Bible."

It is thus hardly surprising that it should remain a text that those of us who have discovered it come back to time and time again, like some spring or source which is constantly fresh. The longer that we stay with it the more it reveals its depths. It speaks to us all at whatever point in our lives we may be and at whatever moment of our spiritual journey. And perhaps this new millennium will open a significant new chapter in which it is increasingly those living outside traditional monasteries and convents who are making it foundational for their religious lives.

Patrick Barry, o.s.b., the former abbot of Ampleforth, the largest Roman Catholic community in Great Britain, in the preface to what he calls a new translation for today, says that the Rule is intended not only for men and women living in Benedictine communities, and for the lay oblates associated with them, but also for the many ordinary people "who have found spiritual inspiration in the Rule which helps them to be faithful in their personal vocations as Christians."

Although it is now over fifteen years since I first wrote this very simple book on the Rule, intending it for lay people like myself, the publishers are reissuing it since it has remained so popular. It is clear that great numbers of people—people busy with work and family commitments, many finding it stressful to hold together the demands of their busy and complicated lives—are today turning to the monastic tradition. Increasing numbers of people who are retired or without a job and with leisure time on their hands are trying to discover how to live with a new freedom in the monastic tradition. I believe the main reason, quite simply, is that here they find what they know they most need: practical help and guidance in imposing the order and structure on the circumstances of their ordinary and daily lives that will give them a way to find God.

The writer of this short text—for it is no more than nine thousand words—was never himself a priest. This comes as something of a shock to many people who have become used to associating the monastic vocation with the priesthood, and probably do not realize that the clericalization of monasticism was a largely historical development. But in St. Benedict himself we have a layman writing a guide for his household, his extended family of brothers with their busy shared life and all its inevitable demands: preparing food and washing up, looking after guests, maintaining buildings and property, educating children, caring for the sick, and also earning a living. His concern was to help them impose on this busy life such a structure and order (both external and interior) that they could make prayer the one essential priority, the central focus of everything else. There was here no separation of prayer and life. Everything flowed from one center, that contemplative center which so many people today recognize as what they themselves are also looking for but which sadly the institutional Church, with all its many organizations, its talk and busy-ness, its concern with management and efficiency and statements about issues, does not seem to make a priority.

St. Benedict lived between 480 and 540, so the Rule therefore comes from those earliest times of the undivided Church of the fifth and sixth centuries. It predates those unhappy divisions which occurred at the Reformation, and instead speaks of what is common, universal, foundational to all Christians. So today in America Protestants and Lutherans, Episcopalians and Catholics, all find themselves at home in this Benedictine spirituality. Here all the splits and political divisions and party lines are transcended and instead we are pointed to the kingdom. The essential dynamic that underlies the monastic tradition is in the end simply a matter of letting our life be shaped by the Gospel. St. Benedict points us to the Gospel, to the word, to the love of Christ, and that is something that we all share. Here is the promise of an undivided Church, of the kingdom, which we can all claim.

"Listen"—that is how the Rule opens. It establishes the key to what St. Benedict is asking: that we listen to one another and listen to God. "Listen with the ear of the heart," he will say later. This is total listening, not the cerebral listening of the head but coming from the heart which is the true innermost self. It means to listen with sensitivity and openness, and if Benedict looked for it in his followers in his day he would equally expect it of all of us today. The hospitality of a Benedictine monastery is proverbial, but we should not forget that this is not only the hospitality of the welcome of the open door, it is also the open heart and the open mind. In a world that is becoming increasingly polarized, in politics as well as in religion, Benedict is once again prophetic.

The Rule helps us all, both in our personal and secret inner lives (where, as it were, we nourish the hermit side of ourselves) and also in our relationships with others (the community side), whatever shape that may take today, as many of us find ourselves in numbers of interlocking circles: marriage, family, work, school, office, parish. Wherever we are St. Benedict can bring us wise and practical support and guidance, for he never writes anything except what he knows from his own experience; that is why he can touch us all.

This is not theoretical or abstract moralizing, it comes out of lived experience. Above all he knows that life must be a never-ending journey. For him life in Christ means life through a succession of opening doors, not a life that is always static or safe. We can translate the vow of conversatio morum as the challenge to continual, on-going conversation, being open to the new, saying yes to following Christ’s call to discipleship wherever that may lead.

This will inevitably be tough. Among St. Benedict’s favorite words are perseverance, steadfastness, and patience, words that come so often in the psalms and which really amount to committing ourselves to holding on against the odds. Here another Benedictine vow comes into play. St. Benedict is the master of paradox, and if he tells us to move on he also tells us to stand still. Stability, from the Latin word meaning to stand, means staying still, remaining firm, not necessarily in a geographic sense, but in the more fundamental sense of the interior holding firm, refusing to run away, recognizing that we are in this for the long haul and that we will stick it out to the end. When so much of the spirituality on offer today seems to hold out the prospect of self-fulfillment and progress (a response I sometimes feel in my more cynical moments to the demands of the contemporary consumer market), the tough-minded realistic honesty of St. Benedict is refreshing.

But there is a third vow, that of obedience. This used to present me with difficulties until I realized that it came from the word obaudiens, to listen intently, to listen to the voice of God, to hear God’s voice and follow it—so that we are led along the path of God’s will rather than our own. This means that the point of reference in my life will always be the presence of God, to whom I listen and respond with a yes that comes not from fear but from that love which St. Benedict presents to us as the mark, above all, of the Christian. Am I daily becoming a more loving person? Ultimately that is his question to each of us. What he wants is that we run the way to God, our hearts over-flowing with love, a love that is not lukewarm or half-hearted, but fervens, fervent, burning. For St. Benedict, man of balance and moderation, is also a passionate man! We should never underestimate the urgency with which he addresses us. I have found him guide and support, but also prophetic and challenging. While he is gentle and understanding of human frailty he also expects much of each one of us, simply because he believes in our God-given humanity, and wishes to live life to its fullest.

For over fifteen hundred years the Rule has been a source and spring to which men and women have come for guidance, support, inspiration, challenge, both comfort and discomfort. It has helped both those living under monastic vows and those living outside the cloister in all the mess and muddle of ordinary, busy lives in the world. My hope is that Seeking God will serve as an introduction to this live-giving way and will encourage people to discover for themselves the gift that St. Benedict can bring to individuals, to the Church, and to the world, now and in the years to come.

I have written this new introduction on August 1, 2000, the Celtic festival of Lammas, the feast of abundance, the gathering-in of fruits. Perhaps it carries a peculiar significance in the first year of a new millennium. With what gratitude do I celebrate the abundance of the riches that St. Benedict has brought to me. My wish and my prayer is that others will also find here and enjoy their own particular gifts and that as a result their lives will be enriched and blessed by the vision of St. Benedict.
    Esther de Waal