Ever since my first big plunge into monastic thinking several years ago surrounding the
Order of the Cowgirl at the first Emergent Gathering, I have taken keen interest in the Rule of Saint Benedict. Rather than taking my cue from the "12 Marks of the New Monasticism" and things of this nature, I have been more inclined to take on the hermenuetical task of re-applying the wisdom of the ancients to our present situation as the budding of the Oak Grove Abbey has transpired.
The most direct application we have engendered from Benedict's Rule is his beautiful picture of hospitality as a receiving of every guest as Christ Himself. We aspire to do this in our frequent hospitality -- no so much with lodging as with meals, parties, deck dialogue, and common prayer. Our kindred spirit in cyberspace, A, recently blogged about
hospitality. Through one of his commenters, I was exposed to
this brief series of reflections on the contemporary application of the Rule to true Benedectine monasteries. There are a number of paragraphs throughout that I resonate strongly with, and I hope the rest of the Abbey-dwellers might link on over and peruse as well.
In addition to Ward's useful fleshing out of the concept of
hospitality, I also liked very much his distiction between
community and common life. His understanding of common life is far more descriptive of what the Oak Grove dares to be / become than the more abstract notion of community.
Finally, this quote seems terribly apropros for us today on a great number of levels and layers:
Monastic obedience is not a carrying out of an order, but a total giving of self to God through a monastic community. Such giving sometimes does involve pain and hurt because the individual cannot "march merely to his/her own beat." But then neither can a spouse in a marriage or a child in a family. Obedience within the monastery today rests upon the idea that the cenobium, the community, is a society of persons who, through mutual love, sanctify each other. Obedience is the Yes of community living.
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Scott Bartchy is a radical. He believes in a subversive system that embraces those on the fringes of our society and seeks to establish a new way of life that goes against the status quo.