Softening our Hearts while Hardening our Hands

Ausculta, o fili, præcepta Magistri, et inclina aurem cordis tui… “Listen, my son, to the instructions of the master and incline the ear of your heart.” These are probably the best-known words that we have from St. Benedict of Nursia, generally regarded as the founder of Western

Monasticism. They make up the prefatory invocation in his Rule—that is, a calling of his reader

to the right disposition to understand a set of prescriptions for the monastic life. This says only

a very little, for the careful reader of Benedict’s text soon realizes that it contains a rich and

subtle spirituality capable of speaking to our relation with the whole of God’s creation, not least our own inner selves. This is true already of that first sentence. Benedict’s Latin word cor is at

once a facet or aspect of our soul, much in keeping with the Pauline kardia, and the ground for a distinctive mode of understanding: not merely with the mind, which is always active in the

attempts to grasp and in that way master what our senses report, but in a peace that comes

only when we manage to put that labor of the mind to rest. When Benedict asks us to “incline

the ear” of our hearts, he calls us to a simplicity in which we let things be as they are in

themselves—given, of course, by the loving Creator.

Since Benedict set down his Rule nearly fifteen centuries ago, countless people living far outside

the walls of any convent or monastery have studied and prayed with it with great benefit to

their spiritual well-being. But this certainly does not mean that the Order which he founded has

ever been without large numbers of professed members. Within a short time of the

establishment of the first communities in the general vicinity of Rome, Benedictine spirituality

became an important factor in central Italy, even as it spread around the continent and then,

though this came more slowly, beyond. At present there are approximately four hundred

Benedictine monasteries and convents in the world, and about twenty thousand monks and

nuns living in them. One such community is the Abbey of Regina Laudis, in Bethlehem,

Connecticut. Founded in 1947, the community is dedicated at once to contemplative prayer (all

in Latin), the operation of a farm replete with dairy cows and sheep, facilities to make cheese,

jam and bread, and generous hospitality to retreatants. During this year’s spring break, I

accompanied nine Boston College students to the Regina Laudis for five days of Liturgy of the

Hours, fledgling efforts with the ancient practice of lectio divina (a form of prayer with scripture), and yes, manual labor on the farm.

In some important ways, we had come prepared. Our time at the Abbey was intended, with the

community’s informed approval, as a brief immersion in the way of life that is committed to

Benedict’s Rule, which we had studied in wider context of an interest in relating contemplation

and practice in the work of some Greek and early Christian thinkers. Barely two weeks earlier,

we had turned from the Desert Fathers and Mothers into monasticism, and then read the Rule

with some care. And so there we were on an early Monday afternoon, stepping out of an

eleven-person van into the fresh air and rural quiet of the Abbey. Mothers Maria Evangelista

and Gregory—the former a student of divinity, the latter a student of nursing—were to play the

largest role in our time there, and both immediately proved not only warm and intelligent, but quick to laughter and often quite funny…. Which sent some of us scrambling back to the 10 thstep of Benedict’s “ladder of humility” (Rule, chapter 7), where it is said “A fool raises his voice in

laughter.” “Please explain,” I asked with delight. “There are different kinds of laughter,” we

were told. Of the approved kind, we had plenty during the coming days.

We were frankly impressed with the pace of life there, and generally exhausted by it. Prayer

began with Lauds at 6:15 each morning, and on most days ended with Compline at 7:30 in the

evening, with meals, a number of other trips to the chapel for prayer, and work in the gardens,

the sheep shed, or with a woodchipper also packed into a typical day. This gave rise to another sort of question: “How,” we asked more than once, “with so much going on around here, does a

contemplative nun find time to be alone with Jesus?” On each occasion, we got some version of the same answer: most days bring moments before or after the communal prayers, or when

work falls still for a time, for what the long tradition calls quietem, a kind of restfulness when the drive for activity falls still and suddenly one is alone with the Lord. Benedict would have known

the experience well, having spent three long years in a cave just outside the present-day town

of Subiaco. Its mood is to pervade the good monastery, so that every monk or nun strives to

“regard all utensils and goods of the monastery as sacred vessels of the altar and nothing is to

be neglected” (Rule chapter 31).  At Regina Laudis, as surely for Benedict himself, this vision

reaches easily beyond the walls of the buildings into the environment that the community both

shepherds and loves. Life at the Abbey involves an easy flow from chanting the Psalms into

feeding a few cows or a solitary llama named Tinkerbell, bending heated metal into tools and

works of art, fertilizing bushes, and taking two old dogs for a morning walk, so that life has

every chance of becoming one long prayer beneath the loving gaze of God (Rule chapter 7). We 

were invited into all of these things, and did our best to forget ourselves in them. What better

gesture of hospitality could there be than to be welcomed into an attempt to make of one’s day

a heartfelt prayer?

Throughout the Rule, echoing a major theme of the Scriptures, Benedict contrasts an open and

pure heart with the hardheartedness that comes from closure into one’s own interests.

Perhaps this defines an attitude that it would be especially appropriate to cultivate during the

Lenten season, for what he has in mind requires an abnegation that touches our natures more

deeply than does any common fasting (though fasting would make up a part of it). If this is

correct, then I think what we experienced with our friends at the Abbey of Regina Laudis is a

spirituality that is fundamentally Lenten, but also a good, clear reminder that Lent is not

without its joy, for we know that the Resurrection has occurred.