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Rev. Molly F. James, PhD
Chapel of Our Lord, Episcopal Church Center
July 11, 2019, Feast of St. Benedict
May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be always acceptable in your sight O Lord. Our Strength and our Redeemer. Amen.
Today we celebrate St. Benedict, famous for founding monasteries and authoring a Rule of Life for them that bears his name and has been deeply influential on the spiritual lives of many, inside and outside the monastery. Benedict is perhaps best known for the way he structured the day for his monks: “ An average day includes about four hours to be spent in liturgical prayer (the Divine Office), five hours in spiritual reading and study, six hours of labor, one hour for eating, and about eight hours for sleep.” Sounds like a pretty nice day actually. But where is the commuting? The wrangling of children? The laundry? Paying bills? All the mundane and necessary tasks of daily life. Also, I am not sure we could actually accomplish the jobs we have been hired to do if we only worked six hours. Also I think I would like to have longer than 20 minutes to eat at least some of my meals. But imagine being able to spend four hours a day in prayer. Wouldn’t we be spiritually centered and grounded. Presumably everything would be better if we could spend that much time in prayer. Imagine being able to read the whole of the Book of Psalms every week, as Benedict and his monks did.
Well, I doubt many of us are going to completely follow Benedict’s Rule. Nor the literal admonition in our Gospel reading for today to give up all our possessions. If you are ready to do so, more power to you. I applaud you. I think that level of sacrifice and the daily regimen really only works in a monastery. Yet there are valuable insights for those of us who are striving to live more faithful lives in the midst of the busy-ness of the world and work and family life. The gift for us is in the attitude and approach that Benedict offered. Even if we do not literally give up everything we have and move to a monastery, we can honor the spirit of Benedict’s life and the ways in which he calls us to be more faithful followers of Jesus.
In some ways separating out the day as he did into separate blocks of prayer time, work time, study time, etc. is a bit of a misnomer. The separations could lead us to think that prayer has to somehow be separate from the rest of our lives. Actually in Benedict there is an invitation to intricately weave and connect prayer to everything we do. Indeed our work can be prayer, our mundane tasks can be prayer, our meals can be prayer, everything we do in a day can be done prayerfully.
Even if you know me only a little bit, you might be able to guess that I am not particularly good at Centering Prayer or any kind of prayer practices that requires long periods of sitting in silence. It doesn’t fit well with my personality nor with family life with small children. I used to bemoan my failings on this front, because I had somehow gotten it in my head that quiet, meditative prayer was somehow THE superior form of prayer. But what Benedict’s life and work teach us that prayer does not only need to happen in moments of silence and contemplation, it can happen as we fold the laundry, do the dishes, sit at our desks, commute home, exercise, etc. Prayer is really about deepening our relationship with God and paying attention to how God is at work in our lives and in the world. The question is not about what we are DOING at any given moment, the question is about our own hearts and minds. What is our attitude? What is our disposition? Are we moving through our day with an openness to what God is up to in our lives and in the world?
A number of years ago, I read a book that I found to be very helpful in incorporating spiritual practices in daily life. It is called Sabbath in the Suburbs. It is written by Mary Ann McKibben Dana, a Presbyterian Pastor who lives in suburban DC. She and her engineer husband have three kids in elementary and middle school. They undertake the goal of practicing a sabbath every week for a year. They choose Saturdays because that is the only common day off. The book chronicles their efforts. There is a moment from the chapter on Advent that has stayed with me. Mary Ann looks at her combined to do list of church and family tasks and realizes that a full on sabbath where you stay home and really rest is just not possible that day. So, she decides she is going to go through her task list “sabbathly.” Mary Ann reminds us that it is our attitude, our disposition that matters. Real life happens. We are not always able to live up to the lofty goals we set for our own spiritual journeys. But the realities of life do not mean we have to beat ourselves up for failure. We can simply adjust our mindset and seek to carry the spirit of sabbath with us. If our mindset is in the right place, even our tasks can be prayer.
So, I hope that today is an opportunity to refresh our spiritual lives and to be reminded that just like Benedict and Mary Ann, we can integrate prayer into our daily lives. In fact our whole lives can be prayer. AMEN.
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