Excerpts from a message of Pope St. John Paul II on the Feast of Saint Benedict
My revered Predecessor, St Gregory the Great, a Benedictine monk and celebrated biographer of St Benedict, invited us to discern the basis of a life wholly dedicated to “seeking and serving Christ, the one true Saviour” (Preface of the Mass of St Benedict), in the atmosphere of great faith in God and intense love for his law which motivated the original family of the saint from Norcia. This spiritual striving, which grew and developed as he faced the challenges of life, soon led the young man to foresake the illusions of worldy knowledge and possessions to devote himself to learning the wisdom of the Cross and to being conformed to Christ alone. From Norcia to Rome, from Affile to Subiaco, Benedict’s spiritual journey was guided by the one desire to please Christ. This longing was strengthened and increased during the three years he lived in the grotto of the Sacro Speco ..
His prolonged and intimate union with Christ prompted him to gather other brothers around him in order to carry out “those great designs and goals to which he had been called by the inspiration of the Holy Spirit” (ibid.). Illumined by divine light, Benedict became a beacon and guide for poor shepherds in search of faith and for devout people who needed direction in the way of the Lord. After a further period of solitude and difficult trials, 1,500 years ago, when he was barely 20 years old, he founded the first Benedictine monastery at Subiaco, not far from the Sacro Speco. In this way the grain of wheat that had chosen to hide itself in the soil of Subiaco and to waste away in penance for love of Christ, gave rise to a new model of consecrated life, becoming a fruitful ear of wheat.
The example of St Benedict and the Rule itself offer significant direction for fully accepting the gift of these anniversaries. First and foremost they invite a witness of tenacious fidelity to the Word of God, meditated on and received through “lectio divina”. This involves maintaining silence and an attitude of humble adoration before God, for the divine word reveals its depths to those who, through silence and mortification, are attentive to the Spirit’s mysterious action.
Familiarity with the Word, which the Benedictine Rule guarantees by reserving much time for it in the daily schedule, will not fail to instill serene trust, to cast aside false security and to root in the soul a vivid sense of the total lordship of God. The monk is thus protected from convenient or utilitarian interpretations of Scripture and brought to an ever deeper awareness of human weakness, in which God’s power shines brightly.
Along with listening to God’s Word there is the commitment to prayer. The Benedictine monastery is above all a place of prayer, in the sense that everything in it is organized to make the monks attentive and responsive to the voice of the Spirit. This is why the complete celebration of the Divine Office, whose center is the Eucharist and which structures the monastic day, is the “opus Dei” in which “dum cantamus iter facimus ut ad nostrum cor veniat et sui nos amoris gratia accendat”.
The Word of Sacred Scripture inspires the Benedictine monk’s dialogue with God; in this he is helped by the austere beauty of the Roman liturgy in which this Word, proclaimed with solemnity or sung in plainchant .. The primacy of the Word is thus affirmed in life .. Once it has been accepted, the Word searches and discerns, imposes clear choices and thus brings the monk, through obedience, into the historia Salutis summed up in the Passover of Christ, who was obedient to the Father (cf. Heb 5:7-10)
It is this prayer, memoria Dei, which makes unity of life possible in practice, despite multiple activities: as Cassian teaches, these are not demeaned but are continually brought back to their centre. By extending liturgical prayer to the whole day through the free and silent personal prayer of the brothers, an atmosphere of recollection is created in the monastery in which the actual times of celebration find their full truth. In this way the monastery becomes a “school of prayer”, that is, a place where the community, by deeply encountering God in the liturgy and at various moments of the day, introduces those who seek the face of the living God to the wonders of Trinitarian life.