Chapter 4: Guidelines for Christian and monastic good practice (paragraphs 6-8)
Keep the reality of death always before your eyes, have a care about how you act every hour of your life and be sure that God is present everywhere and that he certainly sees and understands what you are about. (From para. 7 of Ch. 4 of Saint Benedict's Rule, trans. by Patrick Barry, OSB, 1997.)
Keeping the reality of death always before my eyes is countercultural advice, to say the least. But it gets easier as I get older, both through scrapes with mortality and the realization that all I can really do with life is to love it on its own terms. But most significantly, letting go of my ego in meditation gives me a glimmering of experience of the quality of being that comprehensively bright and expansive and ever-present.
“The only sufficient commitment is that total personal commitment that comes from a childlike heart”. (John Main,”Monastery Without Walls”, Kindle loc 3867). Benedict’s list of “Tools for Good Works”, seventy-three of them—scare me when I meet them again here. But then, Abba, you remind me, through Father John, that perfect love can cast out my fear, and the perfect love of a child will cast it out perfectly. I can turn and relax once again.
ReplyDeleteBy keeping death before my eyes, makes me more focused only on the important in life. But this is not always the case, so I need to gaze more at 'my death.'
ReplyDelete