Welcome to our “little cloister”
where we
EXPLORE MONASTIC WISDOM FOR EVERY DAY LIVING
Drs. Almut & Chuck with little one
Home of
+The Hildegard Seminar,
+Kierkegaard Masterclass,
+Bach Passionweek Consolations,
+The 12 Days of Christmas Contemplations &
+The “Little School” of Spiritual Formation
All tagged Saint Benedict
The “inner monastic” is a nice metaphor for the goal of spiritual formation. This image will always be shaped by our prejudices of the true goal, our limited experience, and our own psychological needs and fears. So our progress toward the goal will require constant revision. We can unpack it as the cultivation of attitude (e.g. of longing, of proper detachment), of knowledge, (e.g. of particular practices, but also knowledge of oneself), and of skills (e.g. listening, self-critique). Over this coming Fall, I will begin a series of posts on these aspects of waking your inner monastic. Please join us.
Mindful obedience sets us free because it balances the heart on the eternal. Never finished, always imperfect, always getting up again, always needing sound advice from others, always desiring, or wanting to desire, the eternal.
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?
When we pray regularly, we create an architecture in time that allows the transcendent to break through, slowly, imperceptibly – in the way flowing water shapes stone.
It’s seems an open secret that being alone is an important art, but that most of us find it difficult to do. In fact, being alone can be dangerous: One can fall into loneliness and despair. But solitude is different from loneliness, it neither means nor endorses leaving people behind, but calls us to retreat into the presence of the moment in which we are alone with God.
Who is this King of Glory? Oddly, when we open the doors, our royal guest is an infant. And the child comes in the most astonishing and appropriate way, borne by a mother in pain and hope, born in poverty, bound to a life of wandering and homelessness.
When our will bumps up against the will of another, we can discern the desires of the true self.
During our Italy pilgrimage one morning we woke up in the Monastery of St. Scolastica, at the foot of the mountain of Cassino, on whose summit Benedict founded his last (and some say greatest) monastery, Monte Cassino. St. Scolastica is a striking contrast from the gold and power of Monte Cassino at the top of the mountain.
On Monday of last week, we visited a cave in a valley near Subiaco, a one-hour drive directly west of Rome, into the Apennine mountains that run down the center of the peninsula. Benedict’s story begins in this cave where, as a young man he spent 3 years as a hermit, with a local monk lowering him food in a basket.
