Chapter 60: The admission of priests into the monastery
An ordained priest who asks to be received into the monastery should not be accepted too quickly. (From para. 1 of Ch. 60 of Saint Benedict's Rule, trans. by Patrick Barry, OSB.)
If I head into a community thinking I have superior gifts and no need for humility, I become a threat to the community. My gift to the community is to be open to mutually transformative relationships, to be open to interpersonal freedom.
“The way that our tradition teaches us to approach this self-revelation of God is not to think, to analyze or to reason but to learn to be like a little child, to learn to be humble.”(John Main, “The Way of Unknowing” Kindle loc 1143) No matter what my professional background or formal didactic history the entry to wisdom is low, requiring me to stoop, become small, a little one.
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