We're very pleased to introduce our speaker tonight. Well, welcome sisters and brothers. I'm very honoured to be here with you. Very glad to be here to talk to you, a chance to reflect and to share with you what Saint Benedict means in my life, to share with you as an act of gratitude since the rule is the text by which I live and Benedict is the guide and mentor to whom I turn wherever I am on my journey to God. I think I'm still amazed at the way in which I first encountered him.

[01:08]

The chance how 10 or 12 years ago we went to live in Canterbury. Very reluctantly, I might tell you. I had a nice teaching job at the seminary that I was comfortable with, but why bother? So there my husband appointed as Dean of the Episcopalian Cathedral there. And, of course, if the Reformation in England, when the monasteries dissolved, there was this direct handover from Benedictine communities to the new Anglican Church. The monastic church becomes the cathedral. These monastic offices are brilliantly telescoped by cranny marking to matins and even so on. There's a lair to portray them daily. The moderation and balance of the Benedictine Way becomes the eloquence via media and the prayer and his monks become the dean and the chapter of canon, the very word chapter in chapter house, their continuity.

[02:21]

And so if my husband becomes Dean and a house goes with a job, a little tied cottage, in this case the house was a medieval Prague lodging. And into that, slightly modernised, I moved with four teenage sons, a lay person living surrounded by remnants of the Benedictine past. And whichever way I went, whichever direction I turned, it was inescapable. There were ruins, there were remnants of past greatness. If I wanted to post, no, mail, a letter, I had to go through the cloisters. A short cut to the shops, I go past the ruins of the infirmary chapel. I drive my car out under the great gate, underneath the arlour, the hall for visitors and pilgrims. the fake house and the grove house were at the bottom of the garden. And so I picked up the rule as a historian to discover something of this way of life which surrounded me and, as it were, I read it as a human being.

[03:35]

I found that it spoke to me directly as a lay person, wife, mother, husband, wife. poor teenage sons, part-time history, husband and public life, which meant endless hospitality. The doors were really always open, whoever came, including, I might say, on one occasion, the Holy Father himself to lunch. And so I found that the rule helped me in this very full and fragmented life. Out of it came, really by chance, the writings in 1983 of speaking God. Again, a Benedictine tradition is that you read a book in Lent, at Browning Point, Virginia. And the book is always initially well in advance, but in 1983 there was a bit of a crisis. The pillar of the establishment and the male theologian

[04:38]

what they'd signed up proved a little bit of a broken pillar. And very reluctantly, like only because it was a crisis, they turned to a woman to get them out of this situation. And Seeking God was written under pressure in six months, something I would never, ever, ever have dreamt. I could have done. Here are the two white and nice safe books. Books that wouldn't exactly change anyone's life. Local government in Gloucestershire, 1775 to 1800. With special reference to prison reform. And now I did this risky thing, writing about religious experience. And also then trying to present Bolivic not only in words but also, we have too many words really, Organizing for a week or better still, 10 days at a time, the Benedictine experience by which a group, ideally 20-25 people, gather together to live out the Benedictine rhythm of body, mind, and spirit.

[05:46]

But we pray together, so do the officers. Then the mornings of study, the afternoons of manual labor, and then those times but let's go and cry it in the evening. A very powerful making of community. And it was that, in fact, which took me to South Africa these last two winters at the invitations of Gretel and Tutu, so that the church there should experience these Benedictines' understanding of making a community. And it was deeply moving. to bring together people who were black and coloured and white, people from just before of well of Catholic tradition and together encounter one another in life. And so I do believe that the world and the church is looking for what the Benedictine way has to give.

[06:52]

Just before I left London, I spent some time on the South Bank with their annual photographic show. There were 150 different contributors and there was board after board. changing their life in London, street scenes and demonstrations and scuffles of the police and East End weddings and all the rest of the scenes that could be parallel time and again in any city of the world. But the first of all, the one that gained the pride was scenes of the Tyburn Benedictine community. a community of enclosed Benedictine nuns living just a moment or two away from Hyde Park Corner, which if any of you know London is one of the busiest centres of that place, right near the heart of consumerism. And there were photos, sisters gathered around a table talking, sisters in chapel, a cell, just the simple bed and the crucifix.

[08:02]

And I thought how significant this was. I thought that here there was a reflection of a deep and perhaps sometimes only semi-articulated longing and a sense of need of what these Benedictine women stood for, a life of prayer, order, coherence and a sense of place. I'm a historian by training and so I'm wary of making too facile parallels and yet I am very much struck with the parallels between the world in which the rule was written and our own world today. The end of the Roman Empire order has broken down, markets collapsing, communications collapsing, huge social imbalance with the poor getting poorer and the rich getting richer, and all the insecurity and fear that goes with that sort of social and economic uncertainty.

[09:11]

And in this world, Benedict recognizes the need for order, both external order and internal order. He builds a world in which people have a place to stand so that they know who they are and where they belong. Times and places established with certainty. We all know how much of the rule is devoted to the establishment of good order and right relationships between people, things, places, God. And the purpose of all this, not to impose from outside the sort of order that is the work of an imperial power bringing control and a framework whose removal leaves a vacuum into which chaos can rush.

[10:15]

But the purpose of all this, inner space and order, space for answering deep human need, respect for those basic inner rhythms which help to make us all human, more fully and completely human, Henry Nawn in the Genesee Diary, which I come increasingly to think is one of the best things that he's written, and during that Benedictine experience ten days, it's the book that I read during dinner, and people very much identify with his really honest writing. He reflects how his earlier life lacks unity. How all the time he's suffering from fatigue and exhaustion as he rushes from one thing to another.

[11:17]

His life is fragmented. He feels restless. He speaks of the divided heart. and he hopes that his time in a monastic community will help him with that and that something of what he learns and experiences there will enter into his life and bring some sort of unifying principle. And what he learns from his experience of those seven months lived out under the rule is what I believe the rule can bring to all of us lay people. Principles of unity, integration, interconnectedness, order, rhythm. Values and vision which I do believe we are desperately hungry for. because a sense of rhythm is something which today's world is losing.

[12:20]

An Australian psychiatrist with whom I talked recently said that only in religious houses is there still some sense of it, of the seasonal liturgical yearly pattern, as well as the daily rhythm, as well as the role of rest days and retreats and festivals. Here is something which is natural and healing and sanctified. Here is something that we need to hold on to. Something which is being lived out in the monastic life and those of us whose lives are determined by deadlines, business commitments, contracts. which ignore and supersede all the basic natural rhythms of life, need to be reminded that all time is seen as holy. As the days open and close, as the seasons turn and the cycles of redemption are celebrated, a whole and healing rhythm begins to flow into time.

[13:36]

Words which I'm sure are only too familiar to you because I've taken them from the Benedictine Sister Statement. The Benedictine way can help us all today, ordinary lay people like myself. I do believe that this is one of the reasons time is modern bondage. We need to see this before we can even start to break free of it. The phrase with which we greet one another is so significant, perhaps we don't even notice it any longer. You must be so busy, we say. Our self-worth depends on the extent of our busyness. I saw it with particular clarity in those years when I was often surrounded by groups of priests' wives meeting in theory to support one another, and this competitiveness began to escalate.

[14:39]

We were married busy men. We never saw them. They did not, of course, take their days off, said with complacency. The underlying insinuation, if my husband is busier than yours, then he must be doing his job better, must be more needed, must be of more value. The food, well, that we didn't ask. Today, time is commodity, and for each of us, time is mortgage. Words of David Starver Ross. to consider the violence that we do the time. Now Benedict knows that violence, insecurity, flux, lack of order are amongst the most destructive forces in human life. So he wishes for us all an orderly universe, a solid base from which to operate, since this is also the way in which everyone works best.

[15:48]

We all need that place to stand. Perhaps because I first encountered the rule in a place in which the buildings themselves and the images that those buildings offer deepened and enriched my understanding of the text, I still come back to the images that monastic buildings offer. On the classical medieval monastery, we can see as an interplay between stable places and the pathways that lead between them. So monastic life can be seen as movement to and from centred spaces, always returning to the centre. and of course in particular life revolving around the oratory, the church, which is the centre of the centre.

[16:55]

It is here that the monk makes his profession. Standing there, surrounded by his brothers, he finds his identity. It establishes and defines him. And that piece of imagery, I think, applies to all of us. The monk stands. The novice seeking admission is asked if he can stand. stand in his place in the community as it moves through life daily from one center of activity to another and through the yearly cycle. He stands before God in his proper place whereas The excommunicated brother finds himself outside, his identity threatened because he's not standing where he properly belongs. He's dislodged from his centre and the hope is that he will return to it.

[18:02]

We all need the certainty of knowing where we stand and where we belong. Those chapters which, when I first picked up the rule, seemed the most remote and irrelevant. All those precise instructions which, to be honest, I found pretty boring about kitchen servers and particularly the organisation of the psalms, the port of the gates, the rest of it. They are, as I came to appreciate, profoundly important. They enunciate the fundamental underlying truth. Things matter. Sleep and food and time and space and order. This is where I find God. You cannot isolate the spiritual and separate it from the material. The normalcy of the Benedictine way, as the abbot said last night, I will not take you out of the world, a phrase whose enormous implications Benedict will never let us forget.

[19:18]

This is ordinary people living an ordinary life. Christ, after all, was a carpenter for most of his life, and it would be very extraordinary for us, too, if our Christian life didn't grow out of the most ordinary daily circumstances. But we do need to be reassured and told that Christianity doesn't isolate the sacred and the secular because sometimes it seems that the message of the church as it reaches us seems to suggest that. So favourite words with Benedict are reverence and respect for everything in our world and in our daily life. This quality of reverence and respect and handling with care in our throwaway world, yes, I think more vital than ever.

[20:31]

Sensitivity and reverence are essential if I'm to live out a full and fulfilling relationship with the world around me. This is God's world and I'm placed in it as part of His creation and it is in and through that that I shall reach God. As the excitement of discovering creation-centered spirituality escalates, I think we need to hold even more firmly and clearly to what we could have found, seen, lived out all the time if only we had laid hold of what in his wisdom Benedict knew. And you may be cheered to know that

[21:34]

St. Francis, as a patron saint of ecology, was recently deposed by Prince Charles on a television programme in England, speaking of ecology and the environment and stewardship, which are issues very close to his heart. Oh no, he said, it's St. Benedict who's got it right. And anyway, he was long before Francis. And he knows all about stewardship. But what we get from Benedict is essentially an integrated view of the world. And it is this which I do believe lay people are searching for. Yesterday, as we waited in the airport at Minneapolis, a young man recognized Sister Mary Anthony Wagner and rushed up with delight to tell him, tell her about his life since he had left St John.

[22:36]

He was running a management consultancy. He told us what was involved in his life and how he was giving management retreats. And he gave me his brochure, which I read on plane coming over here, and what comes through that brochure? A unified vision, a professional staff that will work in harmony, an integrated view of the world. The way in which we handle people is a reflection of the way in which we handle things, and vice versa. There are huge implications, surely, in the fact that the portrait of the seller, who has the care of material things, is taken from the job description of a bishop.

[23:39]

All things in our life, things, material possessions, the earth itself, and not least people, are all out on loan. The other pizza list, they'll be recalled at the time of harvest. Account will have to be rendered of our stewardship. And so we handle kitchen implements and gardening tools with as much reverence as though they are the sacred vessels of the altar. But then I think we also have stewardship of our own gifts and talents and potential. We read chapter 4 on tools of the spirit parallel with chapter 32, the same sort of criterion being applied even though it's a slightly different nature.

[24:45]

And then, of course, so is each person a sacred vessel to be gently handled. All of us, even if we're married, are living by the understanding of chastity in its widest implications, handle with care, And so there we have the exemplar for all of us, the abbot who doesn't rub too hard lest he break the vessel. And the analogy of the Eucharistic vessel brings us back full circle to the deeply incarnational theology of the rule and the delicacy and the coherence with which it is put together, so that often you must discover it quite painful to take it apart, to attempt to talk about it, because it's like threads in a tapestry, so interdependent and interwoven.

[26:00]

All this excitement about stewardship and this underlying recognition of the importance of respect and reverence must, I think, also include respect and reverence for ourselves. The rule is after all addressed to us each individually and each of us is a sacred vessel. Care for ourselves. I am always very grateful for the care with which Benedict always legislates for the well-being of his monks. And he does it because he recognizes that if each and every one of us is a temple of the Holy Spirit, whose chief aim is to glorify God, then that temple has to be kept in good repair, looked after, cherished.

[27:10]

And so all the gentleness and the appreciation of the body that we get in the rule, which is very different from the way in which many of us were brought up in a Puritan or Neo-Puritan tradition, real nurturing and real down-to-earth good sense about food, about sleep, about clothes that fit, Because burnt-out cases, debilitated bodies, are not a worthy offering to God. Irenaeus reminds us that the glory of God is men and women fully alive. And that, of course, is set out so clearly in the prologue. Human beings need to find life's meaning love.

[28:14]

We need to feel ourselves deeply alive, totally alive in the whole of ourselves. All those endless surveys that there are, miasm, which is such a rampant disease, tells us that we are living with what? Percentage of ourselves. But it is true, it is our constant search. That is why, it seems to an outsider, Joseph Campbell has such a hold over here. He hasn't reached England yet, but he will, because we're always just a little behind him. Now Joseph Campbell isn't talking about the search for the meaning of life, but for the experience of life itself. of being alive, so that we actually feel the rapture of being totally and fully alive. You're talking about a search for the meaning of life, he's asked.

[29:16]

No, he replies, for the experience of being alive. And surely that is what we find is on offer. Wake up! come to life, live life to its fullest. The attempt of the prologue to rouse us from sleep and from all those soporifics, putting things off, drifting heedlessness. The offer of the Lord in the marketplace. Does anyone want to see life, good life, And the novice ending those marvellous words, and then I shall live. Now one of the essentials. of being fully alive today is to recognize that we have a deep and vital life that belongs wholly to ourselves, which we neglect at our peril.

[30:34]

There is a great deal of wisdom in the rule. It comes particularly, I think, in the portrait of the cellarer and in the chapter on hospitality about drawing lines, about believing, not believing that we are indispensable, about the ministry of absence. Particularly I think those of us engaged in ministry need to remind ourselves how important it is not only to be creatively present but creatively absent. The danger of too much availability, too much presence and too little absence, too much staying with people and too little leaving them, too much of us and too little of God and His Spirit. Time with God, intimacy with God, not being busy with God but being empty and useless in the presence of God and so proclaiming our basic belief that all is grace and recognizing our dependence on Him.

[31:55]

I think that there is now an increasing recognition of the vital role of silence and solitude and that the laity find that it is in the monastic life, not in the institutional church, that they will find it, that it is there, that it is being recognized and lived out. Contemplative prayer, time to be a part in repriet and solitude. It was very interesting that the other day in England there was a BBC magazine program. It was called Only Connect. It was about retreats and monastic guest houses and solitude and silence. It was put over on a Sunday afternoon, which is not the prime listening time. And yet the BBC had over a thousand letters of inquiry after that programme. And the National Retreat Centre, which is the headquarters of Anglican, Catholic and Methodist retreats, had over 800.

[33:06]

That was the response. Those were the people who actually bothered to take up a pen and write. There is this recognition that One toll of the paradox of being fully human is that we are all, even though we are social animals, even though we're right out E on the Myers-Briggs, have a deep and vital life that belongs wholly to ourselves. Perhaps we tend to forget it. or we bury it or we overlay it with the other side of ourselves because it's always so easy to take part in the great conspiracy of togetherness and noise which is always just lies for him. But the way of Benedict in prayer is it becomes

[34:10]

the disciple to be silent and listen. As always, Benedict knew it all the time because, of course, he never writes except of what he himself has lived out. The way of Benedictine prayer is simply the way he himself lived. He taught nothing except what he had himself experienced And so he knows about solitude and silence, keeping watch, emptiness, waiting, not doing, receiving from God rather than achieving for God. And that silence leads to recollection, leads to listening, and after all I think we could spend the whole of our lives simply with the first word of the rule and being available for God's message, his voice, his word, so that we were always aware of his presence.

[35:27]

I love the way the Latin And chapter 7, semper, semper, semper, like hammer blows, bringing home that sense of always. The sea with the heart of Christ is perhaps the best definition of the contemplative vision, so that then we are so on fire with love that from that love grows our commitment to our fellow human beings and to the world. Only the contemplative vision, growing out of times of solitude and silence, makes possible a life of activity in the world. Once again, we're confronted with the paradoxes that run throughout the rule that then life is like that.

[36:29]

And the Benedictine way helps us to hold these two together. Action, activity, springing from stillness, from the prayer of the heart. Of course, it's not an easy tension. Of course, it's only too easy to lose the relationship between the two and get the balance wrong. And yet I'm so sure that we should hold on to that as our ideal. and goal, and that we should never give up the struggle to hold the two together. Only the contemplative vision makes active life in the world possible, and only in the monastic life do we see this being lived out. Cardinal Basil Hume talks about this, and there he is, a monk of Ampleforth, right as Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster, right at the heart of the church establishment, involved in affairs of pressure at international and national level.

[37:44]

And he uses those familiar images. The monk is safe in the marketplace because he's at home in the desert. He's valuable in the marketplace if he preserves nostalgia for the desert. For it is to the degree that he learned in the desert that he will have something to sell in the marketplace. Thomas Merton gives us this paradox. It is in deep solitude and silence that I find the gentleness with which I can truly love my brother and my sister. Solitude and silence teach me to love my brother and my sister for what they are, not for what they say or what they do. This is the paradox that we all know. And here I do believe that the religious life guards the life of the church.

[38:45]

That what the church, the institutional church, increasingly is giving us is words and more words and statements and projects and restructuring and rethinking. And no, what we, increasing numbers of lay people like myself, are looking for is this ability to hear the word out of a contemplative centre. We need time to listen so that our life is a life of dialogue and we listen to the word. I never get tired of how the rule opens, how Benedict catches our attention. Listen, listen carefully my son, this is advice from a father. It's a most wonderful opening because it is addressed to each one of us as individual son or daughter and as

[39:59]

you know, it's almost certainly based on a catechetical sermon preached at baptism, then I find that very reassuring thought, because it does mean that it's meant for all of us, as much for those of us finding our way to God outside the enclosure or the Bible, but in and through the vows that we made at baptism. And so the rule which is, above all, to hand up the community living, the best practical guide that I know, that difficult and unavoidable task of living with other people and loving them as they really need to be loved, It is yet also addressed to each of us as individuals. We can have no doubt at all here of the tenderness and the loving concern and the real care for each of us as individual.

[41:07]

And I do believe that All of us have to learn to live with ourselves and that that is something which neither society nor the church necessarily teaches or prepares us for. My own experience, a room full of oblates, and perhaps I've been giving a talk about what I just said, the rule as a handbook for living with other people. I get to know them better and half those people wish that that was a problem in their lives. They are alone people and not from choice. This is something that happens to many women that they find themselves on their own and therefore the way in which the rule speaks to each of us as individuals and helps us to live with ourselves is I think one of its most vital and rich messages.

[42:17]

Because the underlying image it seems to me In that opening phrase is the image of the prodigal son. And what Benedict is offering to all of us is a chance to come home. That's all of us. We've left home, left the family circle, strayed, coming to ourselves, seeing with clarity where we are, what we're doing, coming, turning round and coming back home. Breaking out of the isolation, returning, re-entering into relationships. And here it seems to me it's a very simple picture of what must happen to all of us time and again in our lives.

[43:21]

That we hear the voice of God and respond to it, which is of course obedience. That we make that journey back to God, metanoia, returning, which is of course conversatio, and that we come home in the deepest sense, in every level of what coming home may be. Coming home in ourselves, to the place where we belong, to the place where we really ought to be and where, of course, in our heart of hearts, we most desperately long to be. And that's the chance, that's the offer, the opportunity that is presented to us all if we take up and respond to Benedict's offer that you may return in obedience to the one whom you have left.

[44:24]

Hearing, responding, metanoia, coming home. How simple that is, how basic and how unthreatening, how immediately it speaks to any of us on our journey to God, whoever we may be and at whatever point we may be along our journey. I come to see increasingly how for all of us Outside the monastic life, those undertakings, those promises, speak with an immediacy, an urgency of humanity. They're not, of course, bonds or chains or limitations. They are... They're guidelines. They're pointers in the right direction.

[45:28]

They are horizons which beckon us. They help to mill the disposition of the heart and of course all the time Benedict speaks to the heart. Tells us that lovely phrase to listen with the ear of the heart. So for people like me they aren't so much actions which we undertake, but rather modes of perception, ways of seeing into which we shall grow, which will, I believe, enable us to encounter ourself and the world on a deeper plane. And so the final gift of the rule today for the laity

[46:21]

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