The Rule in the Modern Day

I remember as a young adult being amazed by my first encounters with St Benedict and the Rule he wrote.  I was visiting Worth Abbey in Sussex, and it seemed hard to understand why monks would choose to be in a church praying and singing at a quarter to seven in the morning.  What kind of early morning madness was this?

About four decades later, I am still amazed by St Benedict and the Rule, but not quite in the same way that my young adult self was.  Over the years I have had very many early morning starts myself for work, often with tricky journeys to get there. So what impressed my young adult mind as an early start seems not now to be as remarkable as I thought then.

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So where does my enduring amazement for St Benedict and the Rule come from, if not in getting up early?  From my reading and reflection, I have taken a sense of balance that Benedictines seek between prayer, work and community.  Each of these elements needs attention, but added together they can give us more:  deeper roots and an overall coherence.  As the mathematical side of my brain might put it, 1 + 1 + 1 can be more than 3.

Over the years, my life has moved through different stages, at various times focussing on building family relationships, studying for exams, working hard at work, then working even harder at work, before retiring from paid work altogether.  For me the balance of prayer / work / community has shifted in response to these stages, with elements sometimes getting very squeezed indeed. 

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I can imagine (I hope) St Benedict listening with a patient smile if I were explaining all this to him.  I suspect that he knew that his Rule, with its reasonable and encouraging tone, talking about nothing harsh or burdensome, was deceptively simple.  What might look like a Rule for beginners, turns out to be pretty useful for a range of folks over the ages. 

Thank you St Benedict.  Congratulations on your 60 years as patron of Europe, and on nearly 1500 years since you founded the monastery at Monte Cassino.  Balancing prayer, work and community: a simple, amazing and lasting idea.

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Patrick Cleary

2025