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 St. Benedict's Rule, trans. by Patrick Barry, OSB, 1997.)
Keeping death always before my eyes -- I am reading this very closely as St. Benedict's advice about how to live in community. He's not telling me to be morbid, or lost in apocalyptic fantasies, and thus, to be a downer to everyone around me. Instead Benedict ties the constant reality of death to realizing the presence of God. The constant reality of death is nothing other than life beyond the ego, the key to life in community.
"Keep the reality of death always before your eyes . . ". Thank you, Abba, for the 7.8 earthquake we just experienced here in Ecuador. Thank you for my being forced to confront so graphically the death and uncertainty that is the part of my and every human beings life. There's lots for me to worry about in life. Like Mark Twain said so famously, I can also say that "my life has been filled with worries, most of which never happened." The gift of my twice-daily meditation, keeping death as my "close Advisor", as Benedict recommends, helps me to enjoy each day, each moment, because then you and I are living it together.
ReplyDeleteI love to dance away from the opening lines of this reading about the thought of, the reality of death. But as Chittister reminds me in her comment, "It is the shattering awareness of our own mortality that brings us to brave the thought of a life beyond and its claim on us"(p.62). Fr. Laurence tells me in his Daily Wisdom for May 23, that "for the Christian, death is separation rather than annihilation". In meditation I am separating(trying to anyway)from all images, and habitual thought patterns which define my ego and support me like crutches. If I separate from what has always kept me propped up what is being replaced? What fills the empty void?
ReplyDeleteIt is through and in meditation that I begin(always seem to be beginning) to be aware of someone beyond me who is within me loving me every moment, every second in time and beyond time.
It is living in that awareness of the presence of God who loves me every moment and beyond that helps me to reach out beyond myself to others letting me drop my crutches and dance into the arms of God with love, trust and joy. Richard Rohr offers me another reminder, that it is "God's love...maintaining me(us) in existence with every breath I(we) take" (Richard Rohr's Meditation: Loving The Presence in the Present for Dec. 29, 2015). As I take another and another breath God is choosing me now so there is no annihilation but rather an affirmation of my existence.