Benedictine Spirituality 2

Benedictine Spirituality 2: Humility

By Judith Dunham

Tom and I have continued our readings in the Rule of Benedict, which for the last month have centered on humility. Although contributed by a fifth century monastic, St. Benedict’s wisdom applies to our lives in the twenty-first cemtury. Sr. Joan Chittister, author of the commentary we are using, observes:

Each of us, monastic or not, deals with the same elements in life. We are all bound to the Gospel, under leadership of some kind, faced with the dictates of tradition or the cautions of experience and in need of direction. (p. 49)

Benedict grounds his admonitions in the Gospel, especially in Chapter 4 of the Rule. He writes, “First of all, ‘love God with your whole heart, your whole soul and all your strength, and love your neighbor as yourself’ (Matt. 22-37-39; Mark 12:30-31; Luke 10:27) …and… ‘never do to another what you do not want done to yourself’ (Tob. 4:16; Matt. 7:12; Luke 6:31)” (p. 50)

While Benedict calls the monastic community to contemplation, nonviolence and peacemaking, St. Joan gives us modern examples of the Rule, It doesn’t talk about conflict resolution; it says, don’t begin the conflict. It doesn’t talk about communication barriers; it says, stay gentle even with those who are not gentle with you. It doesn’t talk about winning; it talks about loving. (p. 51)

The twelve rungs of humility outlined by St. Benedict are difficult to summarize and, taken out of context, lose much of their meaning. He spends s full chapter on humility, with much exposition. At its core, humility is centered on obedience to God as exemplified in Christ’s example. John Forman, a Benedictine Oblate, summarizes the twelve rungs as: 1) always keep the fear of God before [one’s] eyes; 2) the renunciation of self-will and desire; 3) submission to one’s superior in all obedience; 4) patience in enduring hardship with equanimity; 5) self-revelation and the acknowledgement of sinfulness; 6) contentment with the least; 7) the awareness of one’s own liabilities; 8) the avoidance of attention-seeking behavior; 9) the radical restraint of speech; 10) not ready and prompt to laugh; 11) being mild and speaking in a few reasonable words; and 12) embodiment.

Forman also contrasts humility with humiliation. He explains, “One key to differentiate life-giving humility from negating humility is the focus: Grace-given ‘humility’ acknowledges both the individual self and the Self that transcends each of us, while hostile ‘humility’ is entirely self-focused and, ultimately, consuming.” Through grace-given humility, “we discover the human dignity in understanding that we were called to live for God, and how to respond to that understanding so that we are a God-story worth telling.”

In commenting on rung six, Sr. Joan observes, “In a classless society status is snatched in normally harmless but corrosive little ways. We are a people who like embossed business cards and monogrammed leather briefcases and invitations to public events. We spend money we don’t have…We have lost a sense of ‘enoughness’…Benedict tells us to quit climbing. If we can learn to love life where we are, in what we have, then we will have room in our souls for what life alone does not have to offer.” (pp. 69-70)

Sr. Joan calls humility “the lost virtue of the twentieth century” in great need of rediscovery. She writes,

Benedict is telling us that true humility is simply a measure of the self that is taken without exaggerated approval or exaggerated guilt. Humility is the ability to know ourselves as God knows us and to know that it is the little we are that is precisely our claim on God. Humility is, then, the foundation for our relationship with God, our connectedness to others, our acceptance of ourselves, our way of using the goods of the earth and even our way of walking through the world, without arrogance, without domination, without scorn, without put-downs, without disdain, without self-centeredness. The more we know ourselves, the gentler we will be with others.

Amazing Adventures 1

THE AMAZING ADVENTURES OF TOM AND THE HOLY SPIRIT

Or

An Old Man’s Musings Concerning His Faith Journey

Chapter 1

My First Decade as a Beloved Child of God

Where to begin? My earliest recollections of church are of riding the city bus to Mass at St. Francis Catholic Church with my tiny Irish grandmother on Sundays in Bakersfield, California. I was about eight or nine years old, spiritually innocent and naïve, and I adored being able to spend time with my paternal grandmother, Grandma May Dunham.

St. Francis Church was a classic Gothic-style edifice built of red brick with two tall towers on each side, both topped with crosses. The inside was cool and rather dimly lighted with high vaulted ceilings, stained glass windows all around the perimeter, interspaced with the Stations of the Cross and brightly colored, larger-than-life-sized plaster statues of some of the more famous saints and religious figures of the Church.

The nave was divided in half, intersected by a wide main aisle which led up to the elevated chancel and the high altar at its center, directly below a huge stained glass window. This was pre-Vatican II, so the priest celebrated mass with his back to the congregation.

My most enduring memories are of the palpable holiness of the place…the solemnity, the hushed quiet, the echo of voices, both the priests’ and the choir and organ during High Mass and of the pomp and the richness of the vestments and ritual of the liturgy. Hand in hand with these were the “smells and bells,” the lingering odor of incense, frankincense and myrrh, I realized many years later, and the jangling of the bells by the altar boy during the Elevation of the Host.

I can still see and smell, in my minds eye, the bouquets of fresh flowers nestled at the feet of the holy statues and the brass stands holding votive candles, flickering and casting fantastic shadows as they reflected from their ruby-colored glass holders. Often times there were parishioners striking wooden matches to light a candle or two for their prayer intentions and then kneeling, heads bowed and hands clasped in prayer before the statue in the niche.

Another memory is the preparation for baptism, meeting several times with the priest, since I hadn’t been baptized as an infant. My baptism occurred on Palm Sunday with several other candidates, dressed in white shirts, ties, black pants and shoes. We were gathered around the baptismal font with our families, in my case, my proud grandmother, godparents, two Catholic friends of my family, my mom dad and little brother and, of course, the priest. I have no memory of the prayers or ritual, but I do remember leaning over the font as the priest poured the cold water over my head as he intoned the proper prayers.

An interesting note on my godparents…my godmother was a French Basque lady and my godfather was an Irishman, a long-time drinking buddy of my father’s. Both had been friends of my parents for years, were devoutly Catholic, and had watched me grow and mature since my birth.

Between the times of my baptism and confirmation some two years later, I attended regular weekly catechism class. Picture this clueless little country boy attending class in the sheep barn of one of the many Basque sheep growers in Kern County, who lived about a mile from my house. I knew little of Catholic theology and dogma and was awed by the priests and Franciscan sisters who taught the class. On the first day, when my mom dropped me off, I was introduced to Sister Reed, a beautiful young nun who quickly had all of us in the class eating out of her hand. It wasn’t until at least three years later that I realized that her name wasn’t Sister Reed but Sister Rita. As was the custom in those days, when young women made their perpetual profession they chose a favorite saint’s name as their own.

One last recollection of this decade of my life is about preparing for Confirmation. We met for many Saturdays in a classroom of the old St. Francis Parochial school, across the street from the church. The room smelled of floor wax and chalk dust and desks were scarred and well used, being of the type attached to metal runners and having fold-up seats.

The nun who was our teacher wore the brown Franciscan habit of old, was quite stern and always had the dreaded “cricket,” clicker in hand, used often to “keep us in line.” We learned and parroted back the answers to the Catechism questions until we had them down pat and letter perfect. The admonition from the nun that we didn’t wanted to be embarrassed by mistakes when the visiting bishop of the diocese presided at the celebration kept us in mortal fear.

Of that day’s ceremony, I remember very little except that our group made no mistakes in answering the bishop’s questions and he was very complimentary. The other recollection, still clear in my mind to this day, is of him sticking his thumb into a little silver container and then marking my forehead with the sign of the cross.

That all of this happened over sixty years ago and is still indelibly imprinted on my mind is pretty amazing to me. However, the real meaning of all of this only came to me recently as I finally understood the amazing power and grace of the Holy Spirit. Like the salt in the dough mentioned in Scripture, my life has always been guided and influenced by that Holy Presence and I have always, from the moment of my conception, been “a beloved child of God.”