BBC Documentary - Br. Barry at Melrose Abbey
Fw: Chapter Sixty Four - Rule of St. Benedict
On Thursday, 30 October 2014,
Br.Barry ...
Chapter Sixty Four.
Chap. 64 of the Rule is entitled ‘The Election of an Abbot’.
Verses 3 -6 give an indication of how St. Benedict viewed the monastery’s
relation to the local Christian community.
If a monastery elects a man who ‘goes along with its own evil
ways’ then the local Christians have not only the right but the duty to
intervene in that monastery’s affairs: ‘they may be sure that they will receive
a generous reward for this’; ‘they may be sure that to neglect to do so is
sinful’.
Specifically, the local bishop, other religious superiors as
well as ordinary Christians are urged to keep an eye on what the monastery is
doing.
There was, of course, quite a dramatic example of this here at
Nunraw a couple of months ago. The community reversed its decision to build a
new Guest House after considering the forthright views of other individuals and
religious communities.
Be that as it may, these verses of the Rule and those recent
events at Nunraw do highlight the monastery as a local or particular or individual
church, in the sense that St. Paul refers to ‘the church of God in Corinth’ or
‘the church in Thessalonika’. A ‘local’
church usually refers to a diocese so we won’t use that term.
Our Constitutions state: ‘The monastery is an expression of the
mystery of the Church’. Monastic
profession is often described as a deepening or strengthening of the Sacrament
of Baptism.
When the various aspects
of monastic life are seen as primarily the practises of an individual church
then they take on a different perspective.
One advantage of this perspective is that it guards against the
danger of seeing Xtian monastic life as mainly a part of a wider inter
religious monastic culture. In that view, Xtian or Catholic monks are regarded
as having more in common with Bhuddist and Hindu and other forms of monasticism
than they do with baptised Christians. It is quite a common view in a certain
type of monastery–devotee. It is also perhaps present in some monks: Thomas
Merton was, I think, probably guilty of this at one point in his life.
Another Cistercian writer, in the 1990’s, constantly contrasts
‘monastics’ with ‘the baptised’, as if the former were not included in the
latter. Although, to be fair, it is obviously unintentional.
The Eucharist is the source and the summit of the Christian life
so it follows that the monastic community is most clearly a church at its
Eucharistic celebration and a monk is most a monk when he participates in the
celebration of the Eucharist.
When the monastery is seen as an individual church, the Divine
Office, even the littlest of the Little Hours, is carried out not just on
behalf of the Church but as a means, second only to the Eucharist, to deeper
communion with the Church. As Columba Marm
ion wrote ‘when in choir,
we bear a twofold personality, that of our misery, our frailty, our faults but
also that of members of Christ’s Mystical Body’.
Lectio Divina becomes not just a traditional monastic practise
but principally a sharing in the Church’s calling to receive the Word of God.
Mary, the Mother of God, is traditionally the model of the monk in this regard,
‘pondering these things in her heart’.
Mary is also the model of the Church: ‘the whole mystery of the
Church is inseparably bound up with the mystery of Mary’, as someone expressed
it. So in Lectio these two, monk and Church, coincide and by means of his
reading the monk goes deeper into the Church.
But what is the Church?
As in the Word Incarnate, the divine and human are present but
cannot be separated so in a similar way
the Church is made up of visible and invisible elements that are inseparable.
We see the visible in the Church’s organisation, its hierarchy, its members,
its worship, its activity and its buildings.
The invisible is accessible to faith: the Holy Spirit, the soul
of the Church; Christ, its Head; the Father, of whom St. Paul says ‘to the
church in Thessalonika which is in God the Father’.
All these are present in the little church which is a monastic
community and its monastery.
These verses of the Holy Rule illustrate that the monastery is
nothing but part of the Universal Church.
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