Teacher Says . . . St. Benedict’s Rule Gives Order To Daily Life While Leading To Spiritual Growth
By DEXTER DUGGAN
PHOENIX — One of the lessons that a teacher said she learned from the Rule of St. Benedict is that life isn’t like a crossword puzzle where everything must be exactly right, but more like building blocks and “having to see what has to be done and what can be done. We build together with God.”
This woman, Kelley Dawson, a teacher in theology at the Jesuit secondary school here, Brophy College Preparatory, said the Rule, with a capital “R,” includes a number of practical matters for a monastic community, but they’re all aimed at a spiritual goal and also are applicable in the life of the laity.
Dawson spoke to the December 4 session of the Institute of Catholic Theology, an evangelization program based at St. Thomas the Apostle Church here. She graduated from the University of Notre Dame with a master’s degree in divinity.
Some very mundane parts of the Rule cover “where to put pots and pans, how to care for sick people, how to go on vacation,” which all are parts of ordinary life, she said, adding that her children and husband “are my profession in this school of love,” while for St. Benedict, it was the monastery.
Or, Dawson said, the person involved could be a roommate, a fellow worker, or the boss. In any case, the aim is how “to grow in holiness together. . . .
“It’s me being ready to take my life in my hands and place it in someone else’s,” she said, but this doesn’t mean she loses all authority over her life. “We actually become collaborators” with God.
“When you read the Rule, there’s a lot of chatter about things, a lot of chatter about objects,” but this relates to how members of the house serve one another, she said. “So all the rest serve one another in love.”
Beginning her talk, she noted that the Rule also dealt with the reception of guests, who all are to be welcomed as Christ, “who said, ‘I was a stranger and you welcomed me’.”
The Rule requires that proper honor must be shown to all guests, she said, “especially those who share our faith.”
When her children “are freaking out” at home, Dawson said, “Isn’t all family life, isn’t all parenthood a radical form of welcoming the guests, of welcoming the stranger?. . .
“The lives of the saints can be informational,” but also formational, she said.
Benedict was born in 480 and educated in Rome, “with all the trappings of big-city life. But he felt a kind of pull to a simple life,” with discipline and contemplation, and went to the Subiaco area outside Rome, where he met and formed a friendship with St. Romanus, a hermit, she said.
They lived in a hermitage for almost five years, she said, while Benedict became known around the area and was asked to take over a monastery in Subiaco as its abbot. Benedict undertook a rule far stricter than the monks in the monastery were used to and they tried to poison him, Dawson said.
“He ended up gathering some dedicated followers who were really interested in his kind of life and discipline, and he was eventually able to found 12 monasteries in that region,” of which the most famous was Monte Cassino, she said.
Dawson said she found the words of why she was so interested in monastic community in Rowan Williams’ book The Way of St. Benedict, in which this author says, “Holiness is where did you learn to handle things in un-self-conscious ways.”
“Monastic life,” Dawson said, “has a mastery of this tool of holiness found up in proximity to other people. . . . Monastic life is not the life of a hermit. It’s learning to be holy like rubbing up against a million people all day. Sound like family life? Yes. Okay.”
Rowan Williams was the Archbishop of Canterbury for a decade earlier in this century.
“The Rule — capital ‘R,’ Rule — is really the distinguishing feature of Benedictine life,” Dawson said, adding, “My attraction to Benedict and the Rule comes from a couple places.”
First, she said, in graduate school she was beginning to feel “a little untethered in my life,” with her husband working five days a week in Chicago while she lived in South Bend, so they saw each other only on weekends.
With life feeling “chaotic and unpredictable,” Dawson said she made a religious retreat at the Benedictine St. John’s University, in Minnesota, where she became “super-enchanted by, and in wonder of, Benedictine monastic life, just being a guest there.”
Second, motherhood and family life are a rooted life, she said, “not arbitrary and aimless. Having a home life that’s intentional really draws me into Benedictine spirituality.