Dear Benedict
I’m just getting in touch about your 1,500 year old best seller, ‘The Rule of St Benedict’. Still read around the world today, I am one of those would-be readers. I admit it’s challenging. For a start, I don’t live in a monastic community and of course our contexts are different in other ways too. However, I’m determined to give it a go and find a way of opening it up for me and others like me, a dissenting woman of the 21st century, and maybe others too.
I like the beginning. Everything needs an introduction and your prologue is just that. Simple enough to start with, the first thing I remember is ‘Listen!’ Sounds easy but it’s often much harder than that one word suggests. Our world is probably noisier than yours was. Having said that many traditions both religious and secular value listening. Like your Rule, they recognise that true listening gets under the surface of things.
We’re currently suffering from a viral pandemic and in my small corner of rural England, listening has many dimensions. First there’s physical listening: I love to go outside and listen to the sounds of the country side. We know this is a good healthy thing to do, but even this simple step may be difficult for some. Such listening can certainly be easily interrupted by other sounds added to our environment. We live in a constant tangle between what is good for us as people, what keeps us healthy and what we think is good for us who want to better standard of living. High above me is a flight path to one of the UK’s regional airports. Along the valley one of the busiest arterial roads in this county. At the end of the road a building site offers affordable housing and construction noise. It’s a struggle to know what is best for us.
Then there’s another side of listening: listening to speech and attending to what is really being said. In our pandemic times there’s a lot of speech travelling round the world. Some is honest and straight forward and some is not. We have to pay attention to sieve one from the other. So we are agreed, in your time and in mine, listening is essential.
I have spent a lot of my professional life as a listener, but all of us can learn to listen better. Maybe we should each try to make a note of some of our listening and see what we really hear.
From Proverbs chapter 1, a remembered version:
If you’re wise you can still learn more by listening again: even experienced people can learn something new.
Make me a new listener, ready to learn new things.
From a friend of Scholastica’s, and a Member of the Lay Community of St Benedict.