WCCM Oblate Blog: Reflections from Daily Reading of the Rule of St. Benedict

WCCM Benedictine Oblates are encouraged to read a designated portion of the Rule daily, and to write a brief, personal response. I hope that this blog will support our Oblate community in this practice. Please, keep blog entries brief and in a first-person ("I") voice. Refrain from discussing, offering an opinion, or commenting on other entries. Simply consider how a particular section of the Rule is speaking to you in your present circumstances.

Thursday, August 7, 2014

Chapter 58: The reception of candidates for the community (paragraphs 4-5)

When the decision is made that novices are to be accepted, then they come before the whole community in the oratory to make solemn promise of stability, fidelity to monastic life and obedience. (From para. 4 of Ch. 58 of Saint Benedict's Rule, trans. by Patrick Barry, OSB, 1997.)

These precepts, as they apply to my life, are tools of self-knowledge. They remind me that I'm not called to be perfect, but that I am called to be faithful.

1 comment:

Wally SaundersAugust 7, 2014 at 7:22 AM
“So it is that if we become wiser in time it is through experience and practice rather than through abstraction and theory. There is no wisdom that is not the ‘wisdom of humility’ -- none that is not the result of loving more deeply and allowing ourselves to be loved more vulnerably.” (John Main, “Monastery Without Walls”, Kindle loc 1713). “Experience and practice” I obtain in this simple, humble, environment of my community: my family and whomever I meet here, now, today.
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