Dear Benedict,
I’m writing to you again about your Rule, this time chapter 37. You remind us that people of all ages lived in your community and that although the Rule was meant for all, some considerations needed to be made to accommodate the needs of younger and older people living together.
You say that it is human to ‘be compassionate’ to young and old alike. I’m not so sure. Either that or like many things, attitudes have changed over the centuries. We may think we are being compassionate to those who are young or old but COVID19 has revealed a marked lack of compassion in some instances. For example, poverty, is much more likely to affect the young or the old and with many more people now falling into poverty our compassion for young and old seem to be running out.
Fear seems to me one of the biggest drivers of division, insecurity and hate. Of the messages I’ve read recently more and more seem to show a lack of compassion, though I wonder if that is driven by fear. If we are afraid for ourselves and our own near ones then maybe we begin to shun a wider community of need, anonymous people we don’t know. If we are alone at the moment, our connections to community may be tenuous at best, maybe that feeds into limiting our compassion for groups like young and old people. ‘If I don’t have it, why should they?’ or maybe ‘I need it so they can’t have it’.
At the moment in the Lay Community of St Benedict, we are pushing ahead with our Youth Development work (http://www.laybenedictines.org/). another organisation I have worked with, the Diana Award, is looking to recruit young people to help with its work at the moment: https://diana-award.org.uk/get-involved/become-a-diana-award-young-judge/
These are small steps to creating the kind of communities were people of all ages can thrive. But they are important ones, because unless we do so on a local scale more and more of the young and the old will become isolated and marginalised.
From the remembered bible: Your old people will dream dreams, your young people will see visions.
May I unite young and old.
From a Friend of Scholastica and a Member of the Lay Community of St Benedict.