Dear sisters in Christ, the feast which celebrates Our Lady as the Mother of God provides the right setting to propose to you some thoughts on the relation between the Mass and our Benedictine life. What else is a Benedictine family but an image of Mary's womb, which God's eternal wisdom shows resting place, in which the Son of God was born again? It fills us with deep gratitude toward our Heavenly Father that he has called us to live our life according to the rule of Saint Benedict, whose sole purpose it is to let us walk in God's path under the guidance of the gospel. It is true the name of Mary is not mentioned in the rule, but what difference does it make as long as the rule is in fact the faithful mirror of her heart? Blessed is the womb of the Virgin Mary, which bore the Son of the Eternal Father.

[01:06]

Mary could not be the Mother of God if she were not as Catholic as the Church. In her is all grace of the way and of truth, in her all hope of life and virtue. Likewise, St. Benedict was filled with the spirit of all the just, and in his rule he did not limit himself to any particular aspect of Christian devotion or of Christian life. His sole intention was that Christ be born in the hearts of those who enter into the monastic life, and therefore his rule was is and has the breadth and width and the depth and height of the Spirit who overshadowed Mary to make her the mother of the Son of God. This is the reason why to us as Benedictines it is not difficult to see the essential relation between the Mass and our monastic life.

[02:11]

The Mass is nothing but the sacramental representation of our Lord's sacrifice. And our Lord was led to Calvary by obedience. And there he passed from death into life in order to reach the blessedness of heaven sitting at the right hand of the Father. Likewise, the Mass... these the faithful first gathered together in obedience to the word of God, listening. And then in the Mass of the faithful they enter actively into the Passover of Christ, into his passing from death into the resurrection, in the operatory and in the canon of the Mass. And so with him and through him they reach the communion of the part in which the unity of the faithful is sacramentally realized in the receiving of Holy Communion, in the participation in the sacred meal.

[03:25]

It is easy to see that this structure of the Mass is naturally related to the three vows of our Benedictine life, the vow of obedience, that of conversion of mould, and that of stability. Let us then follow the Mass as it develops, and let us show first the relation between the Mass of the catechumens and our vow of obedience. In times of old, the Mass began with a period of silence. The clamorous voice of our self-assertion should be put to silence, that we may lift up the ears of our heart to the voice of grace, the voice which descends from the Father of lights, the voice of redemption, the glad tidings of our Lord Jesus Christ. The mystery of obedience is the surrendering of ourselves to the primacy of divine love.

[04:28]

This is also the theme and the spirit of the vow of obedience in the rule of Saint Benedict. Obedience becometh those who hold nothing dearer to them than Christ, says the rule, thus characterizing obedience as a mystery of love, as our entering into the form of Christ, that we too may become sons of our Heavenly Father. Every novice master, novice mistress, every abbot or superior is aware of the influence which the present crisis of obedience has on the attitude of our novices and candidates. Obedience is being looked upon by them as something negative, a stinting of organic growth of the personality, a perpetuation of immaturity. While in former years a candidate to the religious life would accept rules and regulations without questioning them, this has changed completely in our days.

[05:32]

Do we have to draw the conclusion, then, that modern youth is essentially proud and incapable to understand the vow of obedience? I am inclined to think that the solution of the problem depends very much on the concept of obedience we have. As long as we think that religious obedience is the more perfect, the more passive it is, the less personal responsibility it involves, the clash will be inevitable. Thank God the obedience which St. Benedict asks in his rule is of a different nature. It is formed in the school of the gospel, on the pattern of the obedience which the Son of God offered to his Heavenly Father. This is his. what has to be explained to our novices and postulants. Obedience in the sense of the rule is not the blind obedience asked of the soldier by military authority. It is not the obedience of a number but of a person, of God's child.

[06:35]

It does not want to stifle the sense of responsibility. It wants to lead to maturity. St. Benedict's abbot is elected by the members of the monastic family He relies heavily on the counsel of the brethren. He delegates much of his authority to his officials, the cellar, the prior, the deans. He is willing to listen to the justa murmuratio. His policies are those of a father and not those of a dictator. But at the same time, St. Benedict insists that the monks always keep the spirit of humility, always willing to obey the abbot when he should insist on his decision. Any arguing, any contention in public, any arrogant defending of personal rights or those of other brethren in a rebellious spirit against the authority would be a breach of obedience. The essence of monastic obedience is therefore not a political one in a game of power politics, but a spiritual one, as the ecclesiastical authority is essentially based on the redeeming love of God, so its exercise is a service to the community and to the individual.

[07:51]

It is the obedience which a father asks of his son, a life-giving obedience, and the response which is given is also that of a son and not that of a slave. It is not the idea of St. Benedict that the will of God works through the voice of the superior automatically, so that any suggestion uttered by the monk may spoil or interfere with the will of God. As some people say, the less you tell the superior, the surer you are to fulfill the will of God. If that had been the idea of St. Benedict, He would never have written his chapter of calling the brethren to counsel, in which he states that God often reveals what is better to the younger one, and that therefore all should have an opportunity to express their ideas. Uttering one's opinion is a part of obedience if it is done at the request of the superior in the spirit of humility and not of arrogance.

[08:54]

Certainly the monastic council is not a parliament of monks. Certainly the abbot is not a premier, but his rule should leave room to the Holy Spirit who works through the hearts of his monks. Then obedience will not prove to be a stifling but a liberating force, and even more a true consecration of the natural gifts which God has given to each member of the community. Here, it seems to me, is an important point which youth is apt to overlook. Sure of their good will and their good intention, it may look to many as an unnecessary complication of things to ask often for permissions, because— they may easily forget that it is not the natural goodness of actions and things which make them pleasing to God, but the spirit in which they are done.

[09:57]

And this spirit must be that of the Son of God, who through his obedience reconsecrated men and things to God after they had been desecrated by the disobedience of Adam. Everything, even our best intentions, have to be put upon the altar of Christ, which is the only place on which the eyes of God rest in absolute pleasure. We see then how the mass of the catechumens The obedient listening to the Word of God leads to the second part of the Mass, the Eucharistic sacrifice. There we enter into the Passover of Christ, his passing through death into life. This is also the last meaning of our vow of conversatio morum, or conversion of morals. It is the death of the old man and the birth of the new man. First, the ovatory is the moment in which we provide the material which during the canon is to be consecrated.

[11:04]

In the language of the Holy Rule, this is the moment in which we leave our own will, our evil desires, but also our pride in our own achievements, that we may not be puffed up, but that in all things God may be glorified. How could anybody put his host on the pattern of the offertory and then still not be content with the meanest and worst of everything and still not believe in his inmost heart that he is lower and of less account than all others? Only after we have rid ourselves of all possessions in the offertory are we able to follow the invitation of the priest to lift up our hearts not to ourselves but to God. The canon of the Mass is a wonderful school for that aspect of the conversatio morum which St. Paul calls the walking in the Spirit. Benedictine monastic life is not essentially penitential, nor does it serve essentially any external purpose.

[12:09]

It is rather a fulfillment of St. Paul's word, conversatio nostra in julis est, our life is in heaven. It is the spirit of thanksgiving which transfers us into heaven and associates us to the hosts of the angels around the throne of God. Their praise, holy, holy, holy, echoes in the hearts of the sons and daughters of St. Benedict through the performance of the divine office. However, all the beauty of the church's songs would have no value in the eyes of God if we were puffed up on account of our good works, if we would judge that we could do good things out of ourselves. Only when we realize that everything comes from God are we able to magnify the Lord. He that glories, let him glory in the Lord. This is the foundation of thanksgiving. This is also the reason why the very heart of thanksgiving of the Eucharistia is the memoria, or the effective memorial, of his death and resurrection, which Christ has entrusted to the Church as his bride, that she may celebrate it.

[13:21]

Everything we are and everything we have springs forth from what Christ has done for us on the cross— The sacrifice he offered once on Golgotha remains forever the only source of our salvation. This is the reason why our imitation of Christ is based on our remembering Christ's work of redemption, sacramentally through the instrumentality of the ordained priest, and morally by following the fundamental advice of St. Benedict in the first degree of humility, before everything else, shun forgetfulness. Here is the heart of the Conversatio Morum. It is the continuation throughout the day of the memorial of the Mass, the referring of every action, every thought, every suffering, every exaltation to the death and the resurrection of Christ. I say to the death and the resurrection of Christ. It is essential to the memorial of the Mass that it embraces the entire transitus domini,

[14:26]

It does not stop at the cross. It carries us into eternal life. Joy is an integral part of all Christian suffering because it is by the very fact that it becomes a part of the sufferings of Christ, blessed or life-giving suffering. We who were buried with Christ are rising also with Him. Our sorrow is never a sorrow unto death, as the pagans know it who have no hope. We are not pessimists because we have been transferred from the kingdom of darkness into the realm of the Son of God's love. We tasted the power of the resurrection. Christ in us is the hope of glory. Our monastic life, the conversatio morum, consecrated by the Lord's passing from death into life, does therefore not stop at the task of mortification. but we should certainly not try to escape the cross.

[15:28]

Neither should we try to kill all joy which the angelic life has in store for us. St. Benedict promises to those who do not run away, when the entrance is narrow, that their hearts shall be enlarged and that they shall run with unspeakable sweetness of love in the way of God's commandments. In the terminology of the early church, mortification means leads and is consummated in edification. The vow of conversion of morals is crowned, as it were, by that of stability in the community. And the celebration of our Lord's passage through the Red Sea of Death ends in the Promised Land of the Communio Sanctorum. The sacramental memorial of Christ's work of redemption culminates in the sacred meal. Christ's sacrifice opens us the way to the Father.

[16:29]

St. Benedict considered the Cenobites, monks living in community under a rule and an abbot, as the strongest, most wholesome kind of monks, because they come closest to the apostolic life pictured in the Acts of the Apostles and always considered as the ideal life of the Christians. The vow of stability is therefore the most benedictine of the vows. In our days of broken families, of shifting populations, of unrest, incoherence, impatience, inconsistency, of uprootedness with all its devastating consequences, the vow of stability is of greatest importance. There is nothing that modern youth longs for more than the blessings of family life, but there is also nothing more difficult for them to live.

[17:33]

People are out for themselves. They are only too often inconsiderate of the needs of others and even ruthless. The external forms of social good behavior are being neglected. The simplest rules of reverence, of courtesy, are forgotten in favor of a shallow familiarity which degrades the external forms of friendship in the service of cheap chumminess. Our young people are deeply affected by this trend and are apt to consider the observance of external forms in community life as something artificial, as a remnant from the days of feudalism. they have a difficult time to realize that a community is bigger and older than the individual, that the latter has to adjust himself to the different rhythm of community life and not to judge everything according to his own subjective standards as if the world would begin with him.

[18:50]

Monastic life should certainly not end in stagnation. The past has given us many a lesson in the dangers of conservativism, of the obstinate attempts to maintain obsolete forms. But we should not go into the opposite extreme and try desperately to jump on the bus of the times in order to keep up with the people of tomorrow. We may easily add to the driftwood that fills the waters of our age as a witness to the internal chaos which reigns so widely. Again we have to be grateful to God for the great gift of the rule in which the discretion and wisdom of Saint Benedict kept the perfect balance between individual and community, between form and spirit, between firmness of principles and elasticity in their application.

[19:59]

What is the secret of the modernity of the rule? It is the fact that its author was radicatus et fundatus in caritate, rooted and grounded in charity. The descending love of Christ then abides stands, on which it survives the ages. Here is the haven of peace for the individual soul. Here is also the fountain of a constantly renewed life. In the school of the Scriptures, St. Benedict learned that the Holy Spirit has a certain predilection for the younger one, Abel, Jacob, Joseph, David, and the son of David who taught the teachers as a youth in the temple. And that in the things of the Spirit, seniority is not an infallible norm.

[21:01]

The love of God is eternal and is always new. It is stable and it is progressive. It is not rigid, but it is constructive. It keeps the essentials, but it gives freedom in the accidentals. It cannot be caught in human traditions. It is with us in the divinely instituted signs which seal the new covenant between the Lord and His Church. The last part of the Mass is a perfect incarnation of the stability of divine love. The simplicity and profundity of the Our Father, the prayer of the Lord's family, the intimacy of the kiss of peace, the union of all in the one body and the one blood of the risen Savior, we feel immediately here is the source from which flows the power of Benedictine stability.

[22:03]

Here are our roots. The sparrow has found a home for her fledglings. You are altar, O Lord of hosts. For St. Benedict's charity was not a pretext to become soft, not an excuse to relax the letter of the rule. Perhaps he knew his heart so well that he felt driven to seek a refuge in rigidity. It was his sister Scholastica from whom he learned a great lesson in love. It is said of her that she had greater power because she loved more. May this greater love animate her daughters in our days, that the obedience practiced in their communities may lead them to spiritual maturity. that their conversatio morum may become a law of transfiguration through the power of the Lord's blessed passion, that their community life may expand in the sure haven of Christ's peace, equally removed from stagnation as well as from weak adaptation to a world without principle.

[23:31]

May they... under the guidance of the rule of St. Benedict, become as large as the Spirit of Mary, that the Son of God may be born in the hearts of their novices, who sing with Our Lady, My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Saviour.

[23:54]

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