Christ in Your Life, Abbot Patrick Moore, OSB

To have Christ in your life, it seems to me, is what the Christian life is all about.  By reason of our Baptism we were incorporated into Christ in a very real way; his grace, his love, his salvation courses through our veins and through every fiber of our being, we “live and move and have our being in Him,” as Saint Paul tells the Athenians while preaching at the Areopagus.  (Acts 17:28) 

        If this be the case with every Baptized Christian it is certainly so with the monk.  The monks of this Abbey, who follow the Rule of Benedict, are Christian monks who strive to put into practice the great Benedictine principles; “the love of Christ must come before all else,” (RB 4: 21) and “let them prefer nothing whatever to Christ.” (RB 72:11) For the monk, then, having Christ in his life means he puts Christ first: Christ’s teaching is primary for him as it must be for any sincere Christian.  Monks have vowed to work at this for a life-time and so they should become exemplars of this christic primacy in life for the rest of the world.  The special way monks do this is in the context of living the common life, in the give and take of daily communal living in the monastery, through their work, and in their continual prayer. To do this well demands constant vigilance, effort and study, it does not happen naturally, it is a learned experience.

      In the Holy Rule St. Benedict plots a program for making Christ central in life – to use an academic term, he sets up a curriculum.  Through faith we have come to know him and through study and training we learn how to serve him as he wishes to be served. So it is that Benedict wants his monastery to be a kind of school, a school of Christ, or more accurately “the school of the Lord’s service.” (RB Prologue 45)  Scholars of the Holy Rule are not certain if this meant that Benedict was inclined to model his monastery after schools such as they were in his time. Be that as it may he does set aside a considerable amount of time in the daily monastic horarium for reading and study.  Most of this study was of the Bible and most especially of the Psalms since they were prayed regularly as part of the common prayers.  Monks used the basic principles that were taught in those days: read, mediate and memorize the Scriptures or any other good spiritual texts.  In this way they would shape their lives into the image of Christ. 

     A school in any era is designed to prepare its students for life and a career, the school of  the Lord’s service, however, is designed to prepare its students, or better its disciples, for a life of loving service and deeper union with the God, a union that will last forever.  To be successful the disciple must practice various disciplines – again something expected of any student.  The disciplines of the school of the Lord’s service, in addition to holy reading (called lectio divina) and study, are things like regular prayer and manual labor, fasting and self-denial, care of others and holy leisure.  The discipline of humility was of utmost importance for Benedict.  For him it is the surest way to keep a person focused on God and others and not on himself.  All of these were part and parcel of being enrolled in the “school of the Lord’s service,” whose goal is to facilitate the disciple to learn how to make Christ the center of life. 

      Saint Benedict knew from experience that one never stops learning and so he wanted his monks to have the best possible instructors along the way and who could be a better teacher than Christ himself!  Since the author of the Holy Rule was steeped in the Scriptures he may well have been thinking of Jesus’ words in Matthew 11:29: “Learn from me for I am gentle and humble of heart.”  In other words we learn from Christ in whom we have faith and trust.  It is he who is our primary teacher in and through the Scriptures, in and through the community, in and through its abbot.       

     The abbot in a Benedictine monastery is “believed to hold the place of Christ,” (RB 2:2) and so he must be the principle teacher of the ways of Christ for his monks; he makes Christ present to them. (cf. RB 1980, p. 350)  Benedict has a rather long excursus in Chapter 2 (cf. RB 2 vs. 22-29) on what kind of a teacher the abbot should be.  Basically he says that the abbot should teach by word and example the ways of goodness, service and humility that are exemplified in the life of Christ so that the life of a monk is truly Christ-like. 

      To have Christ in your life is a great gift, it is the most important value we can possess.  The Rule of Benedict gives anyone who wishes to follow it a sure and tried way to make Christ the center of life. It establishes a school-like atmosphere in which to learn the ways of Christ.  At the end of the Prologue to the Rule, Benedict exhorts us to “translate into action the Lord’s holy teachings.”  (vs. 35) As we struggle to do this Benedict encourages us not to grow weary, give up or be daunted – it will get easier as we go along, he says, and, in fact, “we shall run on the path of God’s commandments, our hearts overflowing with the inexpressible delight of love.”  (RB Prol. 49)  My friends, enroll in this “school” it’s only purpose is to make us more like unto Christ and to bring us all together to live with him forever.