Chapter 4: Guidelines for Christian and monastic good practice (paragraph 6-8)
Your hope of fulfilment should be centred in God alone. (From para. 6 of Ch. 4 of Saint Benedict's Rule, trans. by Patrick Barry, OSB, 1997.)
In Awakening 1, John Main says, [Jesus] took prayer as the ground of {...} being, not in the sense of restoring ancient rites or ancient customs from which people ad fallen away, but he was recalling people to the basic, necessary fundamental attitude we must have to God, to God as the most significant and important relationship in our life -- in human life. I hold this expansive truth in my heart: God is the most significant and important relationship in my life.
“47: To keep death daily before one’s eyes.” Somehow my favorite definition of “forgiveness” pops into my head: “forgiveness means giving up all hope of changing the past.” That is part of my daily death, giving up all regrets. Regrets are nothing more or less that a way for me to try to avoid looking at death: at my merciful, constant, daily companion, “Sister Death”, as Francis of Assisi named her. My past is, mercifully, dead, gone, unalterable. Each repetition of the mantra is one more moment of my surrender, of my dying as the knife blade of the present moment moves on inexorably, cutting me off forever, happily, from my past.
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