June 21

The Rule of St. Benedict: Chapter 17

What makes a practice a practice, whether it be athletic, artistic, intellectual, or spiritual, is the repetition of actions with the intent to form an ability or capacity within a individual or community.  A habit also involves repetition but is distinct from a practice inasmuch as it lacks intention around the formation it affects.

This is not to say that practices are good and habits are bad.  Many practices become habits over time and are able to maintain their formational trajectory along the lines of their original intention.  The easier the ability to be formed, the more quickly a practice becomes a habit.  Think of driving a car.  I haven't practiced driving since I was 15 (or for a few hours after completing my last defensive driving class).  Now I just drive, having had the ability to do so adequately formed in me long ago.  The more difficult an ability or capacity to be formed, the longer a practice must remain a practice that maintains the clear intention of its undertaking.  Professional athletes must practice for as long as they desire to remain competitive.  Once the intention is lost and habit takes over, an athlete competing at the highest level loses the edge needed to remain on that level.

The spiritual formation of a human being on a Benedictine path requires lifelong practice.  Our Father Benedict desires to form in us the ability to live in God's tent (RB, Prologue), which is really the capacity to bear God into the world (RB, Prologue).  This is no easy skill set that one can learn by rote and convert into habit.  It requires daily intention of careful practice.

Our prayers can become habitual and memorized over time.  There is nothing wrong with this in the least.  It is not the ability to pray fluently in one way or another that our prayers are intended to form in us.  We learn to pray so that our prayers become a component part of our Benedictine practice with its grand transformative intention.  To consider the prayers themselves to be the intention leads to the legalism, judgment, and pride that has plagued the Church since the beginning.

Br. Chad

June 20

The Rule of St. Benedict: Chapter 16

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 at noon.  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.  During the Summer, I am generally responsible for my three young boys, a true joy and blessing to me.  However, there are days when my youngest 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).  On such days 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 often 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

June 19

The Rule of St. Benedict: Chapter 15

Another outward aspect of the role the Psalms play in spiritual formation is a two-edged sword, quite honestly.  This aspect has sparked not a little tension in my parish as I, the musical liturgist, over the last several years, have moved the chanting of the Psalms to a more prominent place in our liturgy.  The aspect to which I refer is the role of the Psalms in shaping our language, especially our language about God.

On the one edge, wonderful, ancient expressions of praise and joy, such as "Alleluia!" make their way into our vocabulary via the Psalms.  I'm grateful that our Father Benedict sees fit to keep the Alleluias rolling through the year (with the notable exception of Lent, of course).  We also receive beautiful words like hesed, which is translated as "loving-kindness" or "steadfast love" from exposure to the Psalms, words that attest to God's grace and mercy and faithfulness towards humankind and all Creation.  Some Psalms bring us among high mountains and great forests and the wide oceans and birds and deer and sea creatures, opening our prayer vocabulary to the wonders of Nature.

On the other edge, some Psalms take turns down the back alleys of the ancient world and seem to acquire the dialect of hatred, vengeance, and bravado that grows among oppression and suffering.  This is not a dialect I desire to acquire or that I desire my children to pick up as a way of speaking to or about God and neighbor.  I seek to cultivate gentleness and patience in our household, not animosity and anger.  This is a real tension and a point of legitimate concern for any Christian congregation.

I desire to name here and acknowledge the two sharp edges on either side of this aspect of the Psalms' role in formation.  This is a tension that cannot be easily resolved, and I do not intend to try to do so here.  Holding such tensions in the context of intentional, vowed community is yet another formative aspect of Benedictine spirituality.

Br. Chad

June 18

The Rule of St. Benedict: Chapter 14

Another aspect of the "outside" connection that the Psalms provide is the fact that generation upon generation, going back long before Jesus, has sung the Psalms in its own time as a part of its daily prayers.  The Psalms are a very tangible connection to the Communion of Saints among whom we walk the Christian path.

I feel supported and comforted to know that my heroes of the faith, including my patron Saints Chad of Mercia and Joseph, husband of St. Mary, took these words daily upon their own lips in prayer to God.  In this way, the Psalms contribute to my conception of catholicity.  It is as though I stand in an ancient river flowing slowly, steadily, forcefully, to meet me, the water having touched the hands and feet of my sisters and brothers who have gone before and continuing on its course far beyond me.

Br. Chad

June 17

The Rule of St. Benedict: Chapter 13 pt. 2

Yesterday I concluded my post by writing, 

The Psalms are intended to connect all of me, body, soul, and spirit, to a world that is much larger than my personal experience and conscious awareness.  I see this connection taking place in two distinct ways . . .

The Psalms connect me to the voice of the human condition that is manifest both far outside of me and deep within me.

Outside

I may or may not feel full of "righteous" indignation against my enemies every day, but I am certain that many people in the world do.  When I take up words of self-justified condemnation against "the wicked," I am offering these very real human events to God as prayer on behalf of all who harbor such sentiments in their hearts.  I participate in an aspect of the monastic vocation as it has been lived out in the East and West for millennia, that of standing before the Presence on behalf of the whole human family, the good and the bad, and unloading its cosmic baggage.

Inside

On the other hand, since, in fact, I do not consciously experience feelings such as overt hatred of enemies on a regular basis, the Psalms provide a means by which I am able to unload whatever unconscious, repressed feelings have built up within me.  They help to locate the hidden pride and envy and anger within me in order to uproot them from my soul so that they do not grow and bear fruit.  In this capacity, the Psalms give voice to the very personal story we each must learn as a part of our inner transformation.

Br. Chad

June 16

The Fourth Sunday after Pentecost

The Rule of St. Benedict: Chapter 13 pt. 1

No matter what arrangement of the Psalms one uses in praying the Offices, it becomes clear rather quickly that one cannot expect to mirror every sentiment or idea expressed in each Psalm with the present state of one's emotions and beliefs.  Attempting to do so is a recipe for cognitive and emotional dysfunction.  Our Father Benedict is not urging us, like some 6th Century praise and worship leader, to "Sing it like you mean it!" when he arranges Psalm 67 right next to Psalm 51 each morning.

This is not to say that both Psalm 67 and Psalm 51 cannot speak to us each and every morning.  But the way in which they communicate is not necessarily by means of our personal sentiments and beliefs.  When I take the Psalms upon my lips, it is not St. Benedict's intention that I "mean" every word in the way our culture conceives of earnest feelings and beliefs.  The Psalms are intended to connect all of me, body, soul, and spirit, to a world that is much larger than my personal experience and conscious awareness.  I see this connection taking place in two distinct ways that I will touch upon tomorrow.

Br. Chad

June 15

Commemoration of Evelyn Underhill, mystic

The Rule of St. Benedict: Chapter 12

Over the next several days, I will offer some thoughts about the Psalms as they function in the Christian contemplative tradition, of which Benedictine spirituality is a part.  My comments will not be closely tied to the content of the Rule for these days, although I may touch on this or that from the daily reading.

The Psalms, in the Benedictine tradition, take up the lion's share of the floor time in the Daily Office.  If we understand daily prayer to be a program for the transformation of consciousness, chanting the psalms is the technology and the curriculum through which that program is implemented.  In this context, the Psalms provide the words with which one raises the full array of the human experience to God in prayer.  And by doing so in the form of chanting, the Benedictine seeks to align body, soul, and spirit in worship before the One.

Our Father Benedict goes to great lengths to assign particular Psalms to various offices in order to guide the monks through the Psalter each week.  He does so because the Psalms are anything but straight forward songs of praise.  Without a wise and careful guide, in fact, they can pose a danger to the spiritual development of a human being.  But with guidance the Psalms can help us navigate the diverse landscape of the human condition in which we find ourselves.

Br. Chad