Dear Benedict,
It seems my idea to start at the end of your Rule and work backwards wasn’t as novel as I’d thought. Of course not! Someone else had already thought of it (Terence G Kardong). Oh well, still plodding backwards through your Rule anyway.
I say plodding but then I do a lot of walking. I was reading an extract of a podcast of a conversation between Bruce Springsteen and Barak Obama which may seem odd but then I’m still not really into podcasts much. It was about their fathers, which is also odd as I’m not really into them either, being no fan of the Rule of the Fathers. Which may seem even odder when you think about reading your Rule, as you are also known in our times as Father Benedict. Anyway, enough oddness for now…
These two men compared stories and found much in common. At the end Bruce offers Barak the advice to walk with his late father ‘not as a ghost but an ancestor’. It’s that I’d like to write to you about today.
It’s partly why I was reading the Rule backwards. I wondered if by doing that I might catch a glimpse of the real Benedict in my rear view mirror. In all the commentaries on the Rule I’d read, I’d found it hard to find the real Benedict. Now I’ve not read Kardong’s backwards book but it seems he thinks we see more of you in the final chapters of your Rule than in the initial ones (an insight provided by another Lay Benedictine). Maybe you were getting more into it.
Any lengthy project can be like that. It’s on the final stretch of the End to End that you seem to have got the hang of it and don’t really want to stop. I tried to make the last mile last a whole day!
Maybe, by the end of your Rule you were coming across more as an ancestor and less as a ghost.
As you might imagine, I chose my affiliation to your sister purposefully. How I wish we had Scholastica’s Rule. As it is we know even less about the real Scholastica. I’m pretty sure she prayed though. I often list my sisters in the faith as my ancestors and there’s no doubt that I benefited from their company on the End to End and most days since. What I look for in an ancestor is someone with whom I have some common ground, so that the struggles are acknowledged not brushed away, but also enough challenges to create a dialogue. That common ground needs to include understanding being marginalised, excluded and finding a voice. It needs to include empathy. Is that in your Rule?
However, I also find there the sort of hierarchical statements about obedience in ways that sit uncomfortably with what we know today about the distortions of life in community, including faith communities. It’s no longer possible for me to contemplate an unquestioning obedience in systems that have not proved to be safe. Neither do I have a test that allows me to completely know what might be safe and what might not. If I reveal things about my identity and find myself abused and made more vulnerable by others in that space, it clearly wasn’t holy to begin with. But how was I to know if I came with my bright niave enthusiasm? Which ancestors should I trust?
‘Look to Christ’, you urge me. Sure, but when others claim, to the vulnerable, that they have Christ’s characteristics how do you know you’re not plodding on with a charlatan? It’s the biggest question out there for faith communities at the moment. More and more people tell me they’re ‘not religious’ but they continue to be ‘spiritual’ in some way. Leaving off the old dead labels on a search for some other ancestors. How about recasting the old label and make ‘religion’ something much more liberating.
When Jesus visited the pool of Siloam some of those present got too bogged down in religious rules, side tracked by conventions and constrained by ghosts, to see what God was doing. It’s hard not to make the same mistake, reject the ‘religious’ without exploring how much more of God there is to be discovered.
So I’ll keep walking backwards through the Rule, looking for the footsteps of holy enough ancestors, for wisdom to step out to.
From my remembered bible: The Shepherding One leads me by still waters.
Restore my soul.
From a Friend of Scholastica and a Member of the Lay Community of St Benedict.