“This moment immense with a stillness that makes you listen and want to be listening, and want to be listening.” The Monks of Weston Priory in Listen

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Before Rod Dreher, Esther de Waal proposed and explained how the Rule of St. Benedict was a wonderful tool for lives lived outside a monastery. She explained how St. Benedict created a bubble of the Christianity as it existed just as the power of politics began to corrupt it and preserved it for us, and hopefully the future. Accessing the Benedictine Way is like looking through a port hole back in time. In each day and age, observing may lead to a different correction, depending on the ills of the age.

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The Benedictine way as lived in a monastery was not designed for all of the people in a society. It is rather a living preservation, an organism of the ways of the early church. Much as the Bible is the living Word recording the life of Jesus and so we would not want to change it, the way of the Rule does not change. Still, the Benedictine way is meant to be a source of living Christianity that bursts out of the monastery as seeds scattered into a wind to reach all of society. It is a source the rest of us can visit, retreat to, and live our lives inspired from. Esther de Waal reaches through the port hole of the monastery and brings us fresh seedlings ready for transplant into our spiritual lives, seedlings meant for busy people living lives in a secular world.

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Esther de Waal wrote this book while a teacher, married raising four sons. She gets the demands of life. I discovered her book in the shop at the Weston Priory Benedictine monastery, a source of retreat and inspiration for many.

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“When we return to the source, what do we find? A table of welcome; bread and wine.” The Monks of Weston Priory

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To his credit Rod Dreher, the current darling of some just now discovering (re-discovering?) St. Benedict’s Rule, quotes one sentence of de Waal at the outset of his own description of the Rule in Chapter 3. In a tweet he called her contributions “indispensable”. When Rod Dreher tells it, we have a new crisis that Western culture is in conflict with the way of the Kingdom of God. De Waal as a teacher reflects an older wiser view that at all times all men’s cultures and the Kingdom of God conflict, that any notion to the contrary is to misunderstand. Esther de Waal’s book came out in 2001.

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Dreher was similarly questionable when he at one point attributes to Locke the idea that government’s job is civil peace, and claims USA constitution is a Lockean document. But Roger Williams, a generation before Locke in time, champions that same idea and gets it from the Bible’s Jeremiah.

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Dreher is an American journalist. He taps into a deep confusion in people that have mistaken America for a type of New Jerusalem — a confusion less likely for non-whites. The mirage seems to have dissolved for much of the white right with Obergefell and for the white left with election of Trump, thus the perceived new crisis. Esther de Waal is an Anglican from the Wales-English borderlands, yet I find her approaches truer to the mark, though similar to, those in chapters four through ten of Dreher’s Benedict Option.

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Esther de Waal starts where the rule starts: with listening. Listen to the Word of God (the Bible). The Rule is a practical scripture consistent way of living — listen the Rule as adapted to your life with all five senses, working at it until following is automatic, like driving home — something you do unconsciously as a baseline of activity. Listen to the authorities in your life. Listen to your brothers in Christ (both women and men inherit fully as “brothers” in Christ). Listen as a disciple.

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“We shall run on the path of God’s commandments, with our hearts overflowing with the inexpressible delight of love.” St. Benedict Prol. 49

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Listening fully is such a challenge that there is twelve step program to learn to listen — and it is progressive meaning that you work on step n only after becoming accomplished at step n-1. The first step is listening for God, maintaining an appropriate fear/respect of God at all times. There are six more steps of interior disposition, and only does the Rule begin to work on outward behaviors. People can spend years on step 1. Far from community most of the year, we unfortunately can be slow. Fortunately, God is patient.

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Monks are asked to stay in one place, usually for life, to form deep roots enabling stability in community. From there, de Waal establishes that another part of the Rule addresses an openness to constant change, a requirement to continually push outside the coziness of safety. The paradox of stability and change is key: we must fully embrace both and achieve balance. There are many facets of life where the Rule will present two polar opposites and expect us to embrace both and find balance: isolation and hospitality, humility and confidence in God’s faithfulness, rhythm and interruption. The ways each concept applies to life will differ out in the world from in a monastery and de Waal addresses practical ways to grapple with that redesign.

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In an abbey, material things do not belong to individuals. When resources are brought in they are shared. Resources are only brought in if they are useful. My kids thought the animals a key attraction, and were a bit shocked when the monk explained each was to become food or, for the luckier, it wool for clothing. There is a refusal to be dependent beyond needs on material things. Dreher recommends practicing asceticism by going without electronic communications devices. It’s a start, but what a tiny sliver of what it means to be ascetic. It is not just our addictions we drop but our wants and temporarily even needs. It is a part of learning to focus outside the self.

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People are God’s image bearers, each showing a facet of God. The hospitality Weston Priory Benedictines is radical, controversial even within the tradition. On March 24, 1984 the dozen or so monks in Vermont took in a Guatemalan refugee family, not for a day or a month but for decades. The children grew up there. Some years, the parents provided the most wonderful feasts on St. Benedict’s feast week-end for the guests to the priory. Retreating to this place annually and watching these monks so committed to isolation be called to such radical hospitality, and that radical hospitality mirrored in their guest’s interaction with the public, etches hospitality into the hearts of those that visit in a way no reading or singing ever could. The rules are executed with all five senses.

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De Waal closes with chapters on authority and prayer. Listening to Benedictine monks worship is to hear the Word of the Lord followed by song, prayer, and prayerful discussion of insights by the monks. There is less reciting than one might imagine, and more heart-felt worship. In this the monks show they are pre-Roman Catholic as they have attributes woven into a cohesive whole in a way lost to the separated denominations of church. It is not just Roman Catholics that retreat to the the Benedictines for renewal. There is a married couple, both Presbyterian preachers in rural churches, that make the annual trip to Vermont many years.

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Returning from retreat, pilgrims ideally keep something like an Esther de Waal influenced version of the Rule. When we garden, we are reminded of the humble monk using his hand tools growing food for the entire priory and guests, and we often eschew motorized assistance so as to better listen. We share meals, remembering community. We values things and people differently, we seem strange. Our lives alternate between the noise of children and guests, and the quietude of five sense based listening in solitude. We expect to be involved in the lives of the people of our church as our community, not just to attend a service, no matter which flavor of Christian church we return to. We don’t necessarily pull our children out of school, for we know they’ll in many cases not be in a monastery when grown, and we’d like to be there to help them learn to manage encounters with culture. We do find them scriptural teaching, in the home and in Sunday School for as long as they will listen, and pull out of environments that turn too toxic to handle.

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For fifteen hundred years, the way of St. Benedict has shined a light pointing to the Way, and Esther de Waal is a masterful teacher in showing us how to bring that Way home.

Originally published on Medium in We are all Overcomers.

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