June 20

Chapter 16

The Rule of St. Benedict June 20

This chapter in the Rule can help to illustrate my earlier point that our Father Benedict does not intend for us to mirror the sentiments and ideas we encounter in each Psalm every time we pray.  In fact, if we think practically about what it would look like to order our days in such a way that we stop and pray seven times, it's easier to perceive that the Psalms function, as Sr. Joan writes, "to wrench [our] minds from the mundane to the mystical, away from concentration on life's petty particulars to attention on its transcendent meaning."  A monk stops and prays regardless of what he "feels" like when the bell rings.

One way the Psalms help to do this wrenching, this reorienting, is by confronting our minds with a different reality than the one we may be experiencing.  For example, my practice includes a midday office that I pray sometime between noon and 3pm.  I have patterned this office after the Sunday and holiday schedule at St. Gregory's Abbey, where the monastic hours of Sext and None are prayed back to back.  Most often this entails praying six Psalms, 123-128, which emphasize one's dependence on God's help and the blessings of domestic life.  Sometimes, when my four year-old has spent the morning in all-out war against my paternal authority and his brothers' petty kingdoms, and I am trying to both work and not lose my patience (failing miserably at both), it does not ring true to chant "children are a heritage from the LORD, and the fruit of the womb is a gift," but these words can help to open my mind to the "transcendent meaning" of the "petty particulars" that populate my life.

Usually there is not such a close correlation between text and circumstance when praying the Psalms, but the consistent value of a practice that engages the Psalms throughout the day is the way that they apply brakes to my personal freight train of thoughts and emotions before it runs away into the sunset.

Br. Chad 2012