CHAPTER 7
34 The Rule, Chapter 7 who would return to bed and sleep, or, worse yet, settle down outside and engage in idle talk." Apparently, he would rather see his monks go back to bed than stay up and "engage in idle talk."
Chapter 48 is another place in the Rule where St. Benedict warns about idle talk. The monk should not engage in it when he is supposed to be doing his reading. "Brothers ought not to associate with one another at inappropriate times." This indicates that there must have been appropriate times in which the brothers associated with one another in conversation.
The point St. Benedict wants to make in this chapter is that silence has a reward. If he appears to have some negative attitudes about speech, it is because he sees the greater value of silence. We all need some silence in our lives. We need it in order to be calm, in order to be creative, and in order to communicate with God. You live in a busier world than I do and one in which there is probably a lot more noise. What is good for monks is good for all Christians. A time of silence is necessary for spiritual growth in all of our lives.
CHAPTER 7
Humility St. Benedict's spiritual doctrine is contained throughout the Rule, but it is most evident in the Prologue, "The Tools for Good Works," and chapter 7, the longest chapter of the Rule.
He begins, "Divine Scripture calls to us saying: Whoever exalts himself shall be humbled, and whoever humbles himself shall be exalted (Luke 14:11; 18:14)." These, of course, are the words of our Lord, not St. Benedict's words. Humility is a virtue that every Christian must practice, and in chapter 7 of the Rule, St.
Benedict teaches his followers how to be humble.
The Rule, Chapter 7 35 He uses the example of Jacob's ladder to instruct us. Instead of the angels ascending and descending from earth to heaven as in Jacob's vision, St. Benedict sees the two sides of the ladder representing body and soul. There are twelve rungs to this ladder, twelve steps of humility. We ascend the ladder by going up it humbly.
On the first step, we are instructed to keep the fear of God before our eyes and never to forget it. This is the kind of fear that makes us dread the loss of heaven and the pains of hell, but, more importantly, it is a holy fear, a love and respect for God. If we have this kind of fear, we will be in control of our actions.
The second and third steps ask us to submit ourselves to the will of God and the will of another human being. The Rule is written for monks who have made a vow of obedience, but monastics are not the only ones who practice obedience. Husbands and wives are obedient to each other. Children are obedient to parents. Everyone is obedient to an employer.
Obedience can be difficult at times, but St. Benedict says, be obedient out of love for God, "imitating the Lord of whom the Apostle says: He became obedient even to death (Phil 2:8)."
The fourth step acknowledges how difficult obedience can be for us. Even when it is unjust, the climber of the ladder embraces "suffering and endures it without weakening or seeking escape." Persevere to the end.
Step five has the monk confessing his wrongdoing and evil thoughts to the abbot. It was a monastic practice long before St. Benedict's time for a monk to bare his soul to a spiritual father. Nowadays we take our sins to the priest in the sacrament of reconciliation, but St. Benedict and many of the ancient monastic Fathers were not ordained. What St. Benedict is emphasizing in this step is spiritual direction, not sacramental absolution. Alcoholics Anonymous has twelve steps of recovery. The fifth is: "Admitted to God, to ourselves and to
36 The Rule, Chapter 7 another human being, the exact nature of our wrongs." Humbly confessing our faults is necessary for every kind of recovery.
The sixth and seventh steps are perhaps the most humbling of all. The monk is expected to be satisfied "with the lowest and most menial treatment," and he should be "convinced in his heart that he is inferior to all and of less value." In terms that are more acceptable to us today, this means, be content with what you have or can afford. Don't think you're better than other people.
'The eighth step of humility is that a monk does only what is endorsed by the common rule of the monastery and the example set by his superiors." In his chapter on the abbot, St.
Benedict admits that "a variety of temperaments" exists in the monastery. He regards the individuality of his monks, but at the same time, for the sake of order in the monastery, he expects them to be conformists. We all know how difficult and humbling that can be sometimes.
Steps nine, ten, and eleven deal with etiquette of speech.
Again we see St. Benedict's great concern about his disciples' use of words and laughter. Humble persons will be careful about what they say; they will speak kindly and won't make braying jackasses of themselves.
The twelfth step says a monk should not only be humble, but he should look humble too. "Whether he sits, walks or stands, his head must be bowed and his eyes cast down."
Nowadays we would think that someone who went around like that was strange or certainly a casuality risk. The idea is, dont' be ostentatious in your appearance and manners. Don't be arrogant.
Don't be daunted by these twelve steps of humility, St.
Benedict says. After ascending them, the climber will "quickly arrive at that perfect love of God which casts out fear (1 John
4:18)."
The twelve steps of humility become so natural to us that
The Rule, Chapter 8-20 37 we are unaware of our ascent. We count neither the steps nor the costs to our egos. St. Bernard says, "It is better to climb than to count/' St. Benedict assures us of this: "Through this love, all that he once performed with dread, he will now begin to observe without effort, as though naturally, from habit, no longer out of fear of hell, but out of love for Christ, good habit and delight in virtue."
CHAPTERS 8-20
The Divine Office Chapters 8 through 20 of the Rule are concerned with the Divine Office. A lot of the material is rubrical, and some of these rubrics are no longer observed in monasteries. In fact, the very structure of the Divine Office as St. Benedict presents it has changed considerably in recent years. Although we may want to overlook these chapters, there are some matters that should not be ignored. These chapters still speak to us about the quality of prayer.
They are situated in the first part of the Rule. Before St.
Benedict deals with all the practical details in the running of a monastery, he wants to establish prayer as the priority in the monks' lives. The Divine Office is the Work of God, and it is the work to which monks are called above all else. All
Christians— lay, clerical, and religious— are called to pray.
Monks, however, have an obligation that differs even from that of other religious. Ask a monk what his community's main work is, and he should reply, "The Divine Office." That is the response St. Benedict would want him to give. Once we had a novice who had been in the novitiate of a modern missionary congregation. Those novices had the Divine Office in
38 The Rule, Chapter 8-20 common only one day a week. On that day he volunteered to work in the kitchen because he did not like praying the Office with other people. He left our novitiate too. He wasn't cut out for our kind of work, the work to which St. Benedict says nothing else should be preferred.
The structure of the Divine Office in the Rule is patterned on the practice of monasteries in the city of Rome. St. Benedict also borrowed some customs from the liturgical prayer of Roman basilicas. Monks and nuns remained faithful to this structure of the Divine Office up until the changes implemented by the Second Vatican Council. The spirit of Benedictine prayer remains the same, even though the letter of St.
Benedict's law is no longer observed.
One of the hours of the Divine Office, which always appeared in the old Oblate manuals, was suppressed by the Second Vatican Council. There is no more Prime. In medieval monasteries after the praying of Prime, the first hour of daylight, the monks assembled in the chapter house. A section of the Rule was read and commented upon by the abbot. Assignments were given for the day, and the officials of the monastery made reports.
In chapter 8, "The Divine Office at Night/' which is the first of the chapters in his liturgical code, St. Benedict sets the time for the hour of Vigils. "It seems reasonable to arise at the eighth hour of the night." St. Benedict's reasonableness is shown in two other ways in chapter 8. "By sleeping until a little past the middle of the night, the brothers can arise with their food fully digested." And he gives the monks an "opportunity to care for nature's needs." St. Benedict thinks of everything.
"In the time remaining after Vigils, those who need to learn some of the psalter or readings should study them." If a monk is going to spend his lifetime praying the psalms, he should know them. Father Meinrad, who taught my novitiate class
The Rule, Chapter 8-20 39 the psalms, told us repeatedly to "make them your own." He wanted us to possess the psalms and to be possessed by them.
In St. Benedict's day, the monks not only had to know the meaning of the psalms, they had to memorize them too.
Psalters were not available for all of the monks.
In addition to praying the psalms at the Night Office, the monks are to listen to readings. "Besides the inspired books of the Old and New Testaments, the works read at Vigils should include explanations of Scripture by reputable and orthodox catholic Fathers."
In summer, because of the short nights, there will be only one reading instead of three (ch. 10). St. Benedict also allows the shortening of readings and responsories if the monks oversleep on Sunday. "Let special care be taken that this does not happen, but if it does, the monk at fault is to make due satisfaction to God in the oratory." In chapter 13, St. Benedict instructs the abbot to pray the Lord's Prayer at the end of Lauds and the end of Vespers "because thorns of contention are likely to spring up" in monasteries. "Thus warned by the pledge they make to one another in the very words of prayer: Forgive us as we forgive (Matt 6:12), they may cleanse themselves of this kind of vice."
Chapter 16 enumerates the seven hours that begin with Lauds, prayed at dawn, and end with Compline, the bedtime prayer. Chapter 17 deals with the number of psalms to be sung at these hours and chapter 18 with the order of psalmody. St.
Benedict concludes chapter 18 with this proviso:
Above all else we urge that if anyone finds this distribution of the psalms unsatisfactory, he should arrange whatever he judges better, provided that the full complement of one hundred and fifty psalms is by all means carefully maintained every week. . . . For monks who in a week's time say less than the full psalter with the customary canticles betray extreme indolence and lack of devotion in their service. We read, after all, that our holy Fathers, energetic as they were,
40 The Rule, Chapter 8-20 did all this in a single day. Let us hope that we, lukewarm as we are, can achieve it in a whole week.
If St. Benedict considered his monks lukewarm in comparison with the desert monks, he can no doubt understand why twentieth-century monks are more lukewarm than sixthcentury monks. It was in the spirit of chapter 18 that our restructuring of the Divine Office occurred in modern times. In our monastery, we pray four hours of the Divine Office, and the psalter is distributed over a two-week cycle. We have departed from the letter of the Rule, but our appreciation for the Divine Office has not diminished.
'We believe that the divine presence is everywhere and that in every place the eyes of the Lord are watching the good and the wicked (Prov 15:3). But beyond the least doubt we should believe this to be especially true when we celebrate the divine office/' These lines from chapter 19 remind us of the decorum we should have at prayer. St. Benedict ends the chapter this way: "Let us consider, then, how we ought to behave in the presence of God and his angels, and let us stand to sing the psalms in such a way that our minds are in harmony with our voices."
Nowadays it is easier for all of us to keep our minds "in harmony with our voices" because our voices are praying in the vernacular. But there are still distractions. Although God and the angels witness the prayer of monks, the monks can see and hear only each other when they are in choir. Some monks want to rush their recitation of the psalms; others want to drag theirs out. Some monks make rude noises in choir; others occupy themselves with grooming habits like cleaning their fingernails or teeth. When we are in choir, we need to constantly remind ourselves that God and his angels are watching all of this.
Chapter 20, the last in St. Benedict's liturgical code, refers to the disposition we should have when praying, especially