This week I finished reading Benedictine Promises for Everyday People by Rachel Srubas. Rachel is a Presbyterian minister, a spiritual director, and the author of several books. I met Rachel several years ago when we both were participants in a summer writing program at Collegeville Institute. I’ll admit that when I started reading the book I expected that it would be applicable to my life but in a small sense, as in here are a handful of things that Benedictines do that may help you, the reader, in your life. But I was wrong. The book suggested much to consider and apply.
The book focuses on three key parts of the Benedictine rule: staying put, listening well (which is another way of saying obedience), and being changed by God. So much of life falls into this rubric. I was particularly struck by Srubas’s writing on staying put, because staying put is what was at the heart of one of my chapters in Finding Livelihood. In the chapter titled “Centripetal Centrifugal Counterpoise,” I wrote that “Staying in place is a pilgrimage too.” We tend to think that movement is good, particularly movement up the ladder, up the power grid, up the chain of command, up the salary structure, up up up. Or at least movement of any pleasant variety: seeing the world, visiting all the new restaurants. But the essay I wrote came from a place of feeling stuck until I looked at things another way. I’m writing this sitting in front of the same window where I’ve written for more than two decades.
Now Srubas helps me further in understanding the good that comes from staying put (please note, there’s no implication in this book to suggest staying put in a place that’s unhealthy or dangerous). Listening well to God and being changed by God follows on this point of staying put. These are the reasons for staying put. There is an intentionality to staying that goes far beyond the fact of a 30-year mortgage or vesting in a retirement plan (wait, is anyone vested anymore?), or a lack of imagination for any other place to be. The intentionality is to put one’s energy into listening well to God and being changed by God.
Srubas writes:
“Whether the vow of conversatio morum [lifelong conversion] is understood as fidelity to monastic life or more broadly as a commitment to turn to God daily and be changed, it is a promise to undergo lifelong conversion. The other two Benedictine promises, stability and obedience, make conversatio morum possible. We stay put not because we have no other choice, but because we choose to abide in Christ with these particular people in good times and hard times alike. This frees us to give ourselves completely to God where we are. Once we’ve become stable, undistracted by a life with too many moving parts, we can listen well enough to detect the voice of God speaking to us through the Scripture, other people, and daily life. It’s this attunement to God, cultivated through a pattern of prayerful living, that allows us to be changed over time into healed people who do more good than harm.”
We’re not all called to be Benedictines or to follow their rule, but Srubas shows us that it can be both exciting and challenging to re-imagine how staying in place is part of a high calling. What are you to be about sitting at the same window every morning? Sitting in the same chair, sitting at the same computer, lying in the same bed? Worshipping in the same church? To whom are you listening? What do you hear? How are you being changed?
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[Photo: My grandmother’s embroidery.]
