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.
Eating a meal signals an important event in Benedict’s monastery and needs to remain important in mine. Benedict makes the meal time very sacred and primary in order to “regulate and arrange all matters that souls may be saved and the brothers may go about their activities without justifiable grumbling.”(RB 41.5) “All matters” include all the daily activities arranged and scheduled in such a way that everyone's expectations can be met, and that bodies can be nurtured in a timely fashion.
What happens in my own life is the tendency to make the meal the last thing that needs to be done because too many other activities interfere. How can I address the spiritual life when the physical foundation is in a shambles? Here is where meditation and the daily ordinary can truly meet. Just as I have set times for meditation, my daily activities need to be set which include meal planning and grocery shopping and all other matters “so scheduled that everything can be done by daylight.”(before bed time). What this entails on my part is a need to carefully choose what is valuable or not and how much energy I have to get everything accomplished requiring on my part, a letting go of those unimportant things. This letting go can be defined as dispossession and poverty of spirit. I never intended to go there but you, St. Benedict, uncover the hidden things in my life that need to be addressed with your Rule chapters.
Eating a meal signals an important event in Benedict’s monastery and needs to remain important in mine. Benedict makes the meal time very sacred and primary in order to “regulate and arrange all matters that souls may be saved and the brothers may go about their activities without justifiable grumbling.”(RB 41.5) “All matters” include all the daily activities arranged and scheduled in such a way that everyone's expectations can be met, and that bodies can be nurtured in a timely fashion.
ReplyDeleteWhat happens in my own life is the tendency to make the meal the last thing that needs to be done because too many other activities interfere.
How can I address the spiritual life when the physical foundation is in a shambles? Here is where meditation and the daily ordinary can truly meet. Just as I have set times for meditation, my daily activities need to be set which include meal planning and grocery shopping and all other matters “so scheduled that everything can be done by daylight.”(before bed time). What this entails on my part is a need to carefully choose what is valuable or not and how much energy I have to get everything accomplished requiring on my part, a letting go of those unimportant things. This letting go can be defined as dispossession and poverty of spirit. I never intended to go there but you, St. Benedict, uncover the hidden things in my life that need to be addressed with your Rule chapters.