RSB: Prologue
Listen and obey
The two key action items in the Prologue are to listen, and to obey. If we could follow these perfectly, there would be little need for the rest of the Rule.
Orazio Gentileschi
Listen
“The fact that we cannot close our ears as we close our eyes . . . may be taken as a sign of our radical openness to the world.”1 Listening is more than hearing, but begins there. The power to attend to the song of life, and differentiate between elements, is not to close ourselves to the world, but to understand better. “Catching the rhythm of the song of life that rings though the world might mean I have to gently open myself more to the surrounding situation, to other people, and even to my own deepest reality.”2
Radical (as in, down to the roots) openness. What hinders you from listening? It could be that—
You are formulating your reply
You are in a hurry
You have a strong emotional reaction that deafens you
You already know the answer
You are thinking about the next thing on your to-do list
You are not interested
You are distracted
No blame attached, here! We all have to work on listening better. What might you do to better listen to the Word, or to the words? We hope this is a topic you can share with someone, and listen to their take on it.
Obey
“To you have I lifted up my eyes, you who dwell in the heavens; my eyes. . . like the eyes of a servant on the hand of her mistress.” (Psalm 122) The key thought here is “your wish is my command,” as the genie said to Aladdin. How might you have already experienced this kind of obedience? Perhaps to a newborn, perhaps to the dying. Think of a time when your own desires were subordinate to the will, or need of another, and understand that from now on your will and desires are subordinate to the Benedictine understanding of the will of God.
This idea needs some elaboration. The rules that follow are not like the sign on the inside of the door of your retreat room, that tells you to strip the bed and where to put the trash. We follow those rules because we value the institution and the relationships we have there. That will not be good enough for this project--we follow these rules because our heart calls us to do it in love.
If your heart is not calling you on some particular rule, spend some time with that.
Obedience to the Rule will allow you to develop monastic habits of living, and these in turn will change your perspective. For example, the memorization of Scripture will stock your mind with concepts and phrases which will spring to mind when you need them to express an idea. The fact that you have a Biblical example will shape that idea, and perhaps show you a side of your own thought that you hadn’t considered before.
Obedience is not oppression. Keeping a vow is a kind of obedience. When we marry, we make a vow to our partner before God. To stay married, we must be obedient to that vow that we ourselves made.
It is only in the extreme cases that obedience involves a clash of wills. And for us, if there is a clash between our wills and the Holy, who do we really want to come out on top?
In community, you may want to ask each other about what obedience has meant, and what it could mean.
Charles Cummings, The Mystery of the Ordinary, page 5
Ibid, page 10