All tagged Formation
We will always fall down. Indeed, it is necessary. But grace is available to not despair, to gently cradle hope and to get up again and continue. The gentle powers, and even our own perseverance, are more evident in how we get up again than in how long we manage to walk without falling.
It is an historical accident of sorts that in the very season when we remember the birth of the holy one among us, we also celebrate the birth of the new year. On this day of new beginning, then, we will investigate another monastic room as we have done before: this time, the Novitiate, the process by which a person becomes a monastic.
For one quarter of the day, every Benedictine is supposed to do reading from the monastery library. But here is the crucial insight. The point is not to have the reader go through the book. It is instead for the book to go through the reader. How different would we read the Christmas story, if we do not just go through the story but let the story go through us?