Freedom from the flotsam of mass insanity

Despite the enormous activism that marks these first decades of the twenty-first century, it’s quite possible to live an active life that’s really rather passive—a life in which I’m simply floating along in the flotsam of the mass insanity of our unruled, unexamined lives. I can be active but unaware of the essence of life, productive but unconscious of God. I can have a bunch of friends and a lot of things that demand my attention, while I live essentially disconnected from others. I can own a mountain of money, move it around to make more money, even give it away to help a mountain of humanity, but that doesn’t mean I know what love is or am even moved by genuine love.

A millennium and a half ago, Benedict fled all this. Awakened from the great Roman dream, he saw clearly his own unconscious and passive loyalty to an unruly, loveless life.

His Rule was the reverse of repression, the opposite of inhibition.

It meant freedom from the mass illusion and collective insanity of his age. It gave him a firm foothold and a sturdy walking stick so that he could wade chest deep in the Tiber’s turbid waters without losing his mind or forfeiting his soul.

Click here to read my Daily Guide.

A daily guide or rule of life as grace

Years ago, when I first bumped into the tale of Benedict, and heard of his famous Rule, I was turned off. All this seemed more than a little fanatical. Rules and regulations, and the dour monks who attended to them, were neither attractive nor inspiring. The whole notion of a Rule conjured up images of a drab and colorless life, men who were austere, forbidding, cold. I was naïve. I knew of such things only from books. More than that, I’d not lived long enough.

As a teenager, my father had wilderness rules that turned me off too. Sauntering across some high country glacier, dad could seem pretty austere, forbidding, and cold. I was young, and his backcountry rules often felt inhibiting, even repressive. I was too young then, too naïve to know that dad’s rules were a form of grace. They not only gave me tools to stay alive in a wide variety of situations, but they also modeled a way for me to encounter the world around me with reverence and awe, able to enjoy creation and revel in the wonder of God.

It’s true, the Latin word, regula, can mean rule, regulation, and regimen, but it can also refer to a model, guideline, or pattern by which we direct and measure our lives.

This latter sense of the word, I’ve grown to learn, is the true sense of St. Benedict’s regula.

Click here to read my Daily Guide.

An introduction to the Daily Guide or Rule of Life

Fifteen hundred years ago, a young man studying in Rome was awakened to see his life and the lives of those around him as mere illusion. He, like so many others, was actively passive—unwittingly and uncritically being carried along by the flotsam of a society going essentially nowhere. Benedict, freshly aroused by a desire for a different way of life, took up residence in a cave outside the city.

He wasn’t the first to put legs on his fantasy of a holy life, but he was the most influential.  And his famous guide for daily life—the Rule of Saint Benedict—has given rebels in every generation a way to stand in the midst of the river, facing upstream, cross through it, and walk the land aware of the wonder of God, present to Mystery.

Rule comes from the Latin word, regula, and is related to words like regulation, regular, rectangle, rectitude, rules and ruler (both kinds: ruler-as-leader and ruler-as-straight edge).

To be who you wish to be---who you were made to be---will require that you too recognize how passive you are to the forces that want to pull you along.

A guide or rule of life is a sturdy walking stick to help you ford the river and go where you wish to go, be who you need to be.

Here's The Daily Guide I, and many others, pray each day.