By now it is well established, that a point of luxurious growth in the church tradition, is from the Benedictine tree.
Title: The Benedictine Tradition: Spirituality in History
Laura Swan OSB Editor, Liturgical Press
isbn 9780814619148, Soft cover pps 156 $31.95
Reviewed by Terry Monagle author and speaker
Click here to order
‘This book is the perfect accompaniment to the ABC series of the Abbey. The more you read this book the more you realise how purely the dear, loud, Aussie, Sr. Hilda, has divined the essence of contemplative life.’
Still from the Australian TV series, The Abbey
One Thousand Australian women applied to join the Benedictine abbey at Jamberoo in NSW as participants in an ABC program.. Does this mean anything? Amongst them were multiple motivations. Despite many being quite non-religious, there was a yearning, a search that led them to apply. When the chosen ones arrived, their immersion into Benedictine spirituality and ways, showed how radical is the Benedictine way of life.
One participant negotiated with Sister Hilda, to be allowed to keep the jewellery and hair dryer she could not do without. Physical possessions were an inherent part of her identity that she could not let go. She says that she had to cheat to survive to break the rule of silence. But despite the crushing challenges of transformation she became allured by some powerful spiritual presence amongst the nuns. She has said, that at home, someone might robustly say, ‘do you want some more, then give us ya plate’. But in the Abbey, a similar question and movement from one of the nuns would have the grace and dignity of a recollected ballerina. This participant in the program says she has tried to stay in touch with the wonderful spiritual state she learnt at the Abbey, but the further the time elapses, the more elusive it becomes. She should read this book.
A son of hers said to her when she came home, ‘Get over it Mum, you just wanted to be on TV’.
Various front ranking theologians and teachers in the 20th century have said that the regeneration of the church will come from a rediscovery of the contemplative tradition. Lawrence Freeman, a Benedictine, leader of the World Community of Christian Meditators is one of this opinion, and there is evidence that this is happening. A local authority, Michael Whelan CM, urges those disillusioned with church institutions to make sure that they pay attention to developing their contemplative side. The inheritors of the Thomas Merton legacy are also promoting the living of a contemplative life.
Inside Monte Casino Benedictine Church in Italy
Very few of us can go and join Sr. Hilda at Jamberoo, or the Cistercians at Tarrawarra. Freeman’s movement attempts to practice a contemplative style of life for religious civilians. Some argue, including Robyn, the ‘ditzy blonde’, from the program, that to lead a contemplative life as a civilian is harder than doing it in the isolated monastic community. The monks and nuns choose their way of life, but in contrast with that, is another participant in the program who needs a rest from looking after her three children including one who is disabled. The need to care for her disabled child was not her own choice. To be a loving mother is an enormous act of obedience to Providence. Of course the nuns take a vow of obedience, but maybe it means looking after the cows rather than the candles, or putting up with an Abbess whose every word might be grating. If both life styles are ascetical, and where a totality of living for the other is demanded, perhaps the ways of life have more in common than is realised.
This book has 14 chapters featuring a précis of the life of some famous Benedictine, and provides samples of the writing or thoughts of each of them. These include Benedict himself, Bede of Jarrow, Anselm of Canterbury, Bernard of Clairvaux, Hildegard of Bingen, Raissa Maritain (the only civilian contemplative person), Bede Griffiths, and most contemporaneously the Trappist Martyrs of Algeria (gosh were those guys brave!). There are other sections on the Chant Tradition, and material from the Conference of Benedictine Prioresses. There are also selections from the Rule of St Benedict that came back to me as Sr. Hilda began to orient the women to the Abbey.
Sr Laura Swan, in her introduction, to the book, says that the Roman world, when Benedict formulated his monastic rule 1500 years ago, was undergoing enormous upheaval, social, economic, and political. There were massive movements of people, disease, hunger, abandonment of farms, abortion, infanticide, and civil war. Christianity itself had many competing and contrary factions.
She is probably right when she says that Benedictine Spirituality is now enjoying a renaissance. And she posits that we live in a ‘world undergoing change at a breathtaking pace’. We are ‘challenged by heart wrenching injustice, genocide is common and familiar, we are busy and disconnected from one another. Isolation addiction and siege our souls’.
It’s an interesting comparison isn’t it? And in both these periods of turmoil, the Benedictine corrective is so radical: silence and stillness, obedience, asceticism.
At various periods in history, contemplative monasteries have sprung up at extraordinary rates. Within a decade or so of the foundation of the Cistercians being founded as a reform of Benedictine monastic practice, some hundreds of monasteries had been established throughout the breadth of Europe.
Would it ever be possible that instead of there just being a couple of Benedictine abbeys in Australian that we might suddenly have thirty or forty?
Whatever, humankind’s religious impulse is resilient and creative.
This book is the perfect accompaniment to the ABC series of the Abbey. The more you read this book the more you realise how purely dear loud, Aussie, Sr. Hilda, has divined the essence of contemplative life.