Friday, December 19, 2014

Chapter 63: Community order (paragraph 1)


So, apart from those whom the superior has promoted for a more cogent reason or demoted for specific faults, all the others retain the order of their conversion to monastic life so exactly that one who arrived at the monastery door at the second hour must accept a place junior to another who came an hour earlier, whatever their age or former rank may have been. (From para. 1 of Ch. 3 of Saint Benedict's Rule, trans. by Patrick Barry, OSB, 1997.)

Order in a community or a family or even my daily life derives from conversion -- turning towards a discipline of seeing God in all things, in all relationships, and  finding stability in Christ  -- in the midst of all that disrupts order.

1 comment:

  1. That pecking order thing again! And my ego screaming to me that I must concern myself with where I stand socially! John Main, however, reminds me to understand that the Christian life is a “call to transcendence”. “For St Benedict, the monastic life was a continuous conversion, not a mere change of social status. The ground on which this conversion is realized is the heart of the monk, his most simple and most absolute level of being.” (Monastery without walls, Ch 11 Kindle loc 2142.) And it is in the ground of my heart that death becomes the passageway to transcendent life, just it does for the acorn and the caterpillar.

    ReplyDelete