Thoughts and Notes on the Rule of St. Benedict

The retreat I went on last weekend was on humility, as St. Benedict presents it in his Rule. One comment a monk made, which I found very interesting, is that St. Benedict never uses the word "wisdom" in the Rule, but he always uses "humility" as basically a synonym for wisdom. For St. Benedict, humility is the root of all virtue, the root of all knowledge, the root of all healthy relationships, including our relationships with God and ourselves. In a way, humility is wisdom, though this was a wisdom that needed to be revealed by God, who took on the greatest humility possible. Such wisdom is not the wisdom of natural man; indeed, it appears like foolishness to him.

Another point that I got from the retreat was that the most effective way of growing in humility is by being humiliated (and this, the Abbot demonstrated by Mother Teresa's example). We should not actively seek out humiliation, or humiliate ourselves purposely, but when humiliation comes (and it inevitably will), this is the time to grow in humility.

Since the retreat, I have been reading over the Rule, reading other sections besides the one on humility. What strikes me with the rule is its extreme practicality, and its deep understanding of human nature. The essence of the rule is that it is not good to go alone, because we do not know what is good for ourselves, or, even when we do, were are not effective at carrying it out. It is better to be under someone, than to govern ourselves. Human nature is broken, and we are prone to weakness, contradictions, mistakes, and we need an environment that cultivates in us our best qualities so that we can become the persons God wills us to be. And this is what the Rule is for, for the creating of such an environment.

I am also struck by how "modern" the Rule is. We are entering a new Dark Age, where the very foundations of our civilization are crumbling, and every man is retreating to his own quarters and his own way of doing things, a (sub)urban feudalism, though this is masked by the pseudo-connectivity of the digital age. We need the wisdom of St. Benedict more than ever, that intentional community and friendships will form and carry our civilization forward to more happy and spiritually-thriving times. And, we need a new chivalry, a new class of men with a code of Christian honor, to rise to the needs of the poor and the weak, for we no longer can count on a government to provide these things, nor, sadly, our many broken families. These men must lay down their lives for Truth, as the knights of old, that it may everywhere be known and honored.

St. Benedict, pray for us.

Our Inhumane Culture

The radio programs on the way to and from work over the past days have been rife with commentary on the recent mass shootings. On the left: gun contol. On the right: improvements in mental healthcare systems. In my opinion, both of these are inadequate. They propose bandages to cover wounds, but dismiss the underlying cause of the infection - why these shootings happen in the first place. It's not because people can get guns. It's not because deranged people can't get healthcare. No, it's because our society is a breeding ground for disconnected, angry, desperate people, and whether we want to believe it or not, we all have a part in this.

This is not to say that the perpetrators of these crimes are not culpable. Their culpability remains unquestioned. What I mean to discuss here is our culpability. People who do evil, antisocial things don't arise in a vacuum.

Everyone has people in their lives: parents, siblings, children, neighbors, teachers, coworkers, passersby on the streets. Friends, hopefully. We are the people in others' lives. We create the environment in which everyone else arises, as they do for us. The environment we make around us with our actions has consequences.

Last night, I got food at a Wendy's. I went inside, and sitting at the tables were people, mostly middle-aged men, by themselves, eating. Eating, that most communal activity! Why weren't these men at home, eating with their families? Where are their families? Do they have families? Do they eat alone every night? I speak of myself, too. I ate alone last night. Why wasn't I with my family? Why don't I ask people to eat with me?

One day, someone doesn't show up at his job. Where did he go? He's sick? He won't be able to work for weeks or months? Maybe never again? What hospital is he in, that I might bring him flowers? He's not in a hospital? Where is his house, that I might bring him food? ... Of course, I don't need to ask such questions. There's sick, and there's "sick", and I instinctively know the difference. "Sick" means don't pry any further; pretend this didn't happen and move on. Yet, life moves on for "sick" people, too, not just for the ones who move on. What becomes of such people?

Yes, people live on after ties are severed. Ours is a culture of rupture. Husbands have no compunction about leaving their wives and not looking back. As do parents their children, children their parents, neighbors their neighbors, friends their friends. We don't like something and we leave and move on. The "throwaway culture", as Pope Francis calls it. We discard people like last year's t-shirt. What does this leave behind? Orphans and widows. Most of us, in some way or another, are orphans or widow(er)s. Because of greed. Because of consumerism. Because of the sexual revolution: promiscuity, divorce, shirking our commitments. We were raised by orphans and widows, too. We've learned how to be human beings from people who are just as broken and orphaned as we who follow.

All of us have been played and are playing a part in this. Ours is a culture that (still sometimes) exteriorly celebrates its Christian identity while, in many ways, it covertly embodies exactly the opposite of Christian charity and communion. Our ulterior mode of action is survival of the fittest. The weakest among us are "human weeds", objects of our contempt: the conservatives try to quarantine them in ghettos or exterminate them in prisons, the liberals want to exterminate them before they are born, in anticipation of their weediness. Margaret Sanger painted the dark side of our culture most infamously:

Birth control is not contraception indiscriminately and thoughtlessly practiced. It means the release and cultivation of the better racial elements in our society, and the gradual suppression, elimination and eventual extirpation of defective stocks— those human weeds which threaten the blooming of the finest flowers of American civilization (emphasis mine).

Yes, there is a sinister side to our American way of life. We, the strong, eliminate obstacles to our pursuit of happiness, even if the obstacles happen to human beings created in the image and likeness of God. Are we surprised, then, that such an inhumane culture cultivates people who carry out inhuman acts of violence? We all have a role to play in this, for evil or for good. The solution has nothing to do with guns or healthcare for mental illness. We have to cultivate awareness of others, awareness of the environments we help to create in others' lives. The solution is to repair the consequences of our culture of death by building large and open communities and families; to form new and difficult ties, to strengthen the ones that exist, and to repair the ones that have broken. One person, one situation, at a time.