Benedictine Spirituality

1
Benedictine Spirituality

• Ten Key Elements for Everyday Life

2
St Benedicts Legacy

• Benedicts Rule for monasteries has been used as
  the cornerstone for monastic life up to the
  present because it is brief, flexible, realistic,
  practical, humane and sensible.
• The basic premise of the Benedictine Rule is
  all that is needed is to be faithful to finding
  God in the ordinary circumstances of daily life.

3
Benedicts World View

• Benedict rejected the degenerate lifestyle of his
  day.
• The Roman Empire was in decline and decay.
• Benedicts message was that with balance and
  moderation, stability, hospitality and
  stewardship, the true values of civilised
  Christian life would be preserved.

4
Benedictine Values

• Stability
• Conversion
• Obedience
• Humility
• Community

• Prayer
• Work
• Hospitality
• Peace
• Compassion.

5
Stability and Balance

• For Benedict, the spiritual pathway was not to be
  littered with difficult and strange practices.
  Monastic, and all life, should be a balance
  between work, prayer and leisure.
• This brought stability, which is essential if we
  are to put on the mind of God and continue on our
  journey of conversion.
• It is a counterpoint to a culture obsessed with
  change, redundancy and pursuit of new
  experiences.

6
Conversion

• Conversion is the disposition of putting on the
  mind of God.
• It is an openness to change, to become daily more
  Christ-like in our words, actions and world-view.
• It is to deliberately walk in the conscious
  presence of Gods dream for humanity each day.
• We tune our ears to Gods way, not that of the
  world.

7
Obedience Listen!

• Benedict urged his followers Prefer nothing
  whatever to Christ.
• Benedictine contemplation revolves around
  listening obediently to the Word of God.
• Listening to the world is to adopt a
  compassionate response to all we encounter to
  listen with the ear of our heart.
• In order to obey the call to listen, we need to
  be silent.

8
Humility

• Humility in the Benedictine tradition is not a
  fawning self-negation
• Humility is aligned with patience it is the
  capacity to realise that not all one wants to
  happen or be can occur in the now.
• Humility accepts that others may not be at the
  same stage as oneself and so one is prepared to
  wait for the right time and place.
• Humility does not place the ego above all else
  it accepts that for peaceful relationships,
  others must be considered. It is essential for
  living in community.

9
Community

• Justice was a strong element of monastic
  community life. It stemmed from humility and
  respect for all creation.
• Benedict decreed that even the youngest novice
  was entitled to his say in community gatherings
  and was to be listened to with respect.
• Benedicts vision for a successful community was
  that the brightest still had something to strive
  for and the least were not discouraged.

10
Work

• For Benedict, life balance was achieved by the
  interplay of work, prayer and leisure.
• Thus the day is broken up into periods of time
  centred around these three life factors.
• Work gives people dignity and is part of our
  co-creation role with God the creator.

11
Hospitality

• The obligation to welcome the stranger as one
  would welcome Christ was imperative to the
  monastic way of life.
• Benedict urged his followers to treat all goods
  as if they were the vessels of the altar that is
  to value and acknowledge the connectedness of all
  creation.
• Benedictine spirituality is strongly aligned with
  nature and God-in-creation.
• From hospitality comes connectedness and
  stewardship and responsibility towards the rest
  of the planet.

12
Peace

• Peace is not the absence of violence or war.
  Peace-fullness comes from the daily practice of
  balance, prayer, compassion, hospitality,
  listening, reverence and hope.
• Peace is the product of conversion to the mind of
  God. It is the life of God. Peace often only
  comes through suffering of loss of ego.
• Peace is the ability to obey the great and lesser
  silences so we can hear with the ear of our
  hearts.

13
Compassion

• Compassion stems from putting on the mind of God,
  from listening with the ear of our hearts and
  motivates our hospitality.
• Compassion is the basis of our response to the
  world and all creation.
• Compassion is the antithesis of a Me before,
  above and over-all culture.
• Compassion draws us towards others, not isolates
  us from them.

14
Hope

• Hope is one of the three great virtues of
  Christianity.
• Hope is a world view. It underpins the risk of
  hospitality, of justice and equality and
  motivates our compassion.
• Hope is the reason we taken on the other
  Christian/Benedictine virtues, because rationally
  and logically they do not make sense.