March 11

Chapter 33

The Rule of St. Benedict March 11 (Ch. 33)

Our national culture places an unqualified positive value on a practice that our Father Benedict here calls a "most wicked vice."  Private ownership generates within a human being a phenomenon that Americans value as a firm foundation on which to build a stable society.  St. Benedict looks at this same phenomenon and instructs that it is "to be cut out of the monastery by the roots."

This striking contrast prompts me to step back and question how it is that private ownership has generated within me the phenomenon that our Father Benedict sees as so wicked and destructive.  How have the roots of this vice infiltrated the soil of my soul in which the Gospel has been planted?  Is the Gospel kept from growing and bearing fruit because of them?  And how does one pull up the roots while living outside of a monastery?

The Gospel according to St. Luke narrates an exchange between Jesus and a "rich ruler" who asks Jesus, the "good teacher," what he must do to inherit eternal life.  The story is a picture of just how a human being can be kept from the full life of God by the vice of private ownership.  The ruler finds that his possessions have shackled themselves around his identity and that removing them from his heart, mind, and soul is more than he can do.  May God do "what is impossible for mortals" and save us from his fate, rich as we are.

Br. Chad 2013