HR 4 – In place of confusing life patterns, the security of a healthy balance – The Holy Rule of St. Benedict with Fr. Mauritius Wilde O.S.B – Discerning Hearts Podcast

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In cooperation with the missionary Benedictance of Christ the King priori presents,

the Holy Rule of St. Benedict, a spiritual path for today's world, with Father Mauritius

Vildi.

Father Mauritius did his philosophical, theological, and doctoral studies in Rome.

Father Mauritius also serves as the prior of Sonton Selnos in Rome.

The Holy Rule of St. Benedict, a spiritual path for today's world, with Father Mauritius

Vildi.

I'm your host, Chris McGregor.

Welcome Father.

Thank you.

The subject we're going to address now is one that I approached with a great deal of

enthusiasm, but then as I pounded it, I became apprehensive because I thought to myself,

what really ultimately does this mean for me?

It's applying the rule in a place of confusing life patterns as opposed to the security of

a healthy balance.

You really have to look, what are the confusing life patterns?

What is that and how can you possibly get some of them under control?

Yes.

I think we human beings are succeeding in creating our very own world.

We make our world, which is wonderful and also part of the task the creator has given

to us.

However, sometimes we don't realize that we go too far or don't think about the consequences

of what we are doing.

Let me take an example.

So there is a natural, healthy balance between light and darkness, between day and night.

This is just a natural rhythm.

What have we done?

We have created electricity, which is wonderful.

And that makes us independent from light or darkness.

So because we can make light in our rooms even at night and can continue to live like

a day and we can shut our windows or we can close our shades and make it dark in our rooms

and pretend to have night.

In the 19th century, when the street lightening, the street lamps were introduced in Rome,

the Pope said, I am against that.

He wanted to forbid street lightening.

As we see, he has not succeeded in doing so, nobody wanted to follow him.

And what I found interesting is that he had already the sense there is something fundamental

going on here.

So when you make day out of night, so this is one fundamental change we have experienced

during the last 200 years.

Another one is weekday, working day and Sunday.

So for our industries and also for the sake of customer service, we got used to work all

week long.

So in a way, we have given up the Sunday.

So for the machines, the robots and the engines, for them it is the best if they work all

the time and we have kind of to serve them nowadays.

And as a consequence, we have lost, at least partly, the Sunday, the Holy Day, the day

when we stop working.

I don't know how many million people have to work on Sundays or holidays in order to

have the others to rest.

But anyway, we have messed up with Sunday, the Sabbath in a way and weekdays.

And the same is true also for the seasons when you think about summer and winter.

Again, what accomplishment to have an air condition?

What a accomplishment to have a heating?

I cannot actually, I cannot imagine to live here in Nebraska without an air condition,

without a heating.

But it is that a couple generations before us, they lived without it, don't ask me how

they really could do this.

And in a way, we have lost the contact, this is the flip side now, the contact to our,

to the seasons, to the change of seasons, to the temperatures.

So if you don't want to, you don't have to experience seasons anymore.

To live in your house, your car is parked in your house.

So you enter your car, you drive wherever you want to go.

So you don't have to leave a heated space or an air condition space.

So you don't have to go outside anymore.

You don't have to.

Which is, as I said, in a way, which is really an accomplishment, I don't want to go back.

But what it means is that we are not so close anymore to the seasons.

But the seasons are a natural rhythm given by God.

So we, we, we human beings even succeed in changing our climate as we probably know.

It's probably caused by us.

It has always changed, but this time it seems that it is, the impact is even bigger.

So as for the, for the human beings, again, it is not about being subject to the nature.

It is good that we use the nature.

But on the other hand, the nature offers us things we need for our lives as human beings,

because we as human beings are still part of nature.

We are nature.

We need the rhythm of day and night.

We need to sleep.

We need to rest weekday Sunday.

We need to have these changes in temperatures in colors.

When we look outside, you know, is it green?

Is it brown?

Is it white?

That is good for our eyes.

It is good for our skin to feel the different temperatures.

It is good probably for our heart for everything to have these changes.

Some people here in Nebraska have told me what they especially appreciate is that here

in Nebraska, we still have all seasons, all four seasons.

Their parts in the world where the seasons are not as, as different.

But what I want to say is, as we have distanced ourselves from this natural rhythms, we have

become, we are in danger now to mess up our whole life anyway.

Or think about our calendar.

This is another thing.

Today we live according to outlook.

We organize our lives with a smartphone.

And sometimes as for a family, it is really not easy to organize everything you need in

outlook calendar.

Otherwise you get to keep everything.

But then we change our appointments back and forth.

And so you cannot live without this calendar anymore, but think about how much our brain

and our mind is occupied with organizing the most simple things.

So we have to organize day and night and Sunday and weekday and the seasons instead of

just letting it happen.

It happens anyway.

We could go with the seasons instead of always organizing it.

This goes back to when I originally approached this.

I had thought that I was looking at it from the end point I now realize that my life has

gotten chaotic because of all of the scheduling and all the things I feel I need to do and all

of the activity.

But what you've helped me to see is that it actually goes, you have to look not from that

point, but way back to the start point of how as humans we were designed a certain way.

And we have altered the very basic way of how we were designed to operate so that the

end result is that chaos in our life.

Because even the rhythm of waking and sleeping and experiencing just the world around us,

we've lost touch.

To go without power for one night, it literally chaos descends into a home and into the person.

Imagine a calendar, an outlook calendar somehow disappears.

The absolute panic and the anxiety and the disgruntledness that comes for.

But that's just the end result of something that we lost side of a long time ago.

To give you a taste, housing Benedict approaches this topic in chapter 41, he writes,

from the 13th of September to the beginning of Lent, they always take their meal in mid

afternoon.

Finally, from the beginning of Lent to Easter, they eat towards evening.

But fespers be celebrated early enough so that there is no need for a lamp while eating,

and that everything can be finished by daylight.

Indeed, at all times, let's supper or the hour of the fast day meal be so scheduled that

everything can be done by daylight.

So it's interesting that even at Benedict's times, they had lamps already, so they could

eat also with the light of lamps.

But it seems that he schedules the life of the community along the lines of the light

of the day and of the natural light.

So we even can imagine that he didn't always pray vespers at, let's say, 6pm or so,

that even the liturgy of the hours, not only the meals, that he scheduled everything around

the natural light.

So why don't go to bed when it is getting dark?

By the way, you find this still in Africa, this was really expressive for me when I was

there as a missionary of Benedictine, that because of the lack of electricity, people

just go to bed at night.

So they go with this natural rhythm and think Benedict, this is what is reflected here

once us as monks, too, to live in harmony with the nature.

It will live in harmony with your surroundings.

I think that's very key.

As it is, the reason this is so relevant is that this isn't just a sign for that area

of Europe which Benedict experienced.

But I mean, you would have Aria Iceland where there is perpetual daylight sometimes or areas

where there is a lack of a change of seasons as you've spoken before to the southern portions

of the United States.

And yet, if you're in tune with those areas, there are differences.

They're not always the same.

There is some type of nuance that if you're akin to it, and usually there's a gift associated

with those changes, too, there's something to be had.

And this is how a Benedictine day is structured.

It is always changing, alternating.

So we start in the morning at 6 o'clock in Skylar at Chrysler King Priory with Vigil and

Lords.

Then we have time for spiritual reading.

Then we go to work.

Then we go to the Eholy Eucharist at 1115.

Then we have our noon prayer, midday prayer.

Then after a little nap, we go to work again.

Then we have Vesperset 6, praying again.

And then we eat and we pray complex.

So there is this alternating way of praying, working, resting.

And this is captured in this classic motto all right, laborer, pray and work.

This is how we, when Dickens are mostly seen, this kind of summarizes our life, pray and

work.

And this is a wonderful motto.

Because it has this change, so don't pray all the time.

Don't work all the time.

Alternate.

A conferee once said to me, what is the most important work in this model, pray and work?

And his answer was, the most important work is and it's interesting.

You will think it is pray, actually Saint Benedict says, we should always have priority

on prayer.

So work is even not as important as prayer.

So the first priority is praying.

But then it is important this at this end to connect finally, prayer with work and work

with prayer.

So while changing back and forth, we bring our work, our daily lives into prayer.

We just come, for example, the best example is noonday prayer, midday prayer.

We come from our work, we are still full of thoughts, worries, whatever and pray.

So we can bring what we have just experienced into our prayer.

And filled with the silence of prayer, with the encounter of God, with his love, with

his encouragement, with his grace, we can get out again and do our work.

So finally, our work becomes prayerful, filled with God's grace.

And our prayer sometimes actually also is work.

So as we dicted, sometimes we pray pretty much.

So sometimes it's just work.

Now I have to pray, it's just part of our life.

But the beauty is in this change, in this back and forth and back and forth.

And it is so basic, it is so fundamental that you can do it all at all times.

At all times.

This I find always fascinating that, you know, there are so many orders, religious orders,

and every order has its very own characteristic and motto.

But I think a reason that our order still exists is that our motto is so basic and so simple.

So you can apply this at all times.

Think about the political situations in Europe and in the world during the last 1500 years.

So there were kingdoms and different political systems and situations.

And what was going on in the monks just continued in pray and work and pray and work and

pray and work because you can do this all the time.

The same is true for the situation of the church.

The church went through good times and bad times.

But what you can always do is pray and work and pray and work.

And this is the rhythm.

This gives us this balance and this connects us with our basic needs as human beings to

be in this world and at the same time, not in this world.

The danger can become when the work then takes precedent over the prayer and that somehow

the prayer can be set aside.

Even the farmers in the field, I love the wonderful manuscript illuminations that the

Benedictines passed down to us along with their beautiful transcriptions of scripture.

But they would have these images and it was usually of the countryside, of the people,

of the changing of the seasons.

And most often, sometimes them stopping to pray in the middle of the field at noon time.

It was so important.

I think maybe we began to really lose that with the Industrial Revolution, that even

in a city that is surrounding a large church in the middle of its populace, there's no

longer a response to the tolling of a bell.

We still do this today as monks.

We interrupt our work when we hear the bell ringing the full hour.

We just stop for a minute, pause and pray.

That is very powerful because it really helps you to see that the work is not as important

as you always think it is.

You know, by the way, your work becomes even more efficient afterwards because you have

stopped.

As you said, this is really our experience as monks to put work as a prayer, as a priority

is so healingful.

Whereas if you have work as the most important thing in your life, I don't know if this

is so really what God wanted us to do.

If I could take the conversation in just a little bit, a path that parallels us in

some ways, is that those who will do work, which they consider is good work, and what

they may feel is what God wants them to do because it is a good thing.

But as St. Catherine of Sienna, somebody I know you have tremendous love for, would

say from the dialogues a father would say, you do so many good things, but they're not

necessarily what I've asked you to do.

So there's not really a godly good.

It's a good thing, but it's not necessarily what he's asked us because we haven't taken

time to ask him.

You know, as monks, we try to live a contemplative life.

And so we very much try to live according to this Martha and Mary, Gospel passage, this

beautiful story, and when Jesus clearly stated that Mary had chosen the better part.

So to pause, to rest, to listen, sometimes is really the thing you should do.

And as monks, we sense that because of the situation in our world, for so many people,

lay people, families, it is so difficult to have these pauses.

Because of that, we see it as our duty to pray for all of them, for all those.

That was from the very beginning.

The monks from the very beginning saw this as their task.

They said, somebody has to pray while others are working in order to help to balance

again, to balance this, that the Holy Spirit may be with them, that they may be protected,

that the grace of God may be with them.

So we want to make this world be more prayerful.

But as you said, finally, is this the task of every Christian to not to forget prayer,

and to give prayer the priority over the work.

But again, sometimes the work can be the prayer as well.

Well, this would all ultimately take us back to one of our discussions on responding

to the needs of others.

And it's all integrated, isn't it?

It's ultimately in this great net that Benedict has woven for us.

I love the location of our monastery here in Skyler.

So we, the monastery is built on this hill, the mission hill, and I am able to look

down, to see down to Skyler to the town.

And when I see the houses and the plant and everything and the cars, the trucks on the

highway, that helps me and reminds me to pray for all these people.

We are a network.

We are so right.

We all belong together and everybody does his part.

This is the beauty of the church, too, that we share our different tasks.

So as Benedict and we try to really keep this balance and to give priority to a prayer.

Any final thoughts, Father?

What I laugh in our daily schedule as Benedict is that we really keep this schedule.

So I have been in the monastery for 28 years now.

And I have experienced only one change of the daily schedule.

The reason is, in order to change our daily schedule, monastic schedule, it needs a two-third

majority of votes.

So when the chapter comes together, chapters, the gathering of all final professed monks,

and we want to change, for example, to get up later in the morning or whatever or earlier,

that needs this change of daily schedule, would need a two-third majority, which is a high

majority.

And so what I just want to say is, the daily schedule in the monastery is kind of sacred.

It is, you don't discuss it, you don't complain about it, you just go along with it.

Kind of similar as you try to go along with the changes of the nature and your environment.

Thank you so much, Father.

You're welcome.

You've been listening to the Holy Rule of St. Benedict, with Father Maurizius Fildi.

To hear and or to download this conversation, along with hundreds of others, spiritual

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This has been a production of Descerning Hearts.

I'm your host, Chris McGregor.

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