RB Reflection: 22 May 2008

Chapter 4: What Are the Instruments of Good Works

62. To fulfill God's commandments daily in one's deeds.
63. To love chastity.
64. To hate no one.
65. Not to be jealous, not to harbor envy.
66. Not to love contention.
67. To beware of haughtiness.
68. And to respect the seniors.
69. To love the juniors.
70. To pray for one's enemies in the love of Christ.
71. To make peace with one's adversary before the sun sets.
72. And never to despair of God's mercy.

These, then, are the tools of the spiritual craft.
If we employ them unceasingly day and night,
and return them on the Day of Judgment,
our compensation from the Lord
will be that wage He has promised:
"Eye has not seen, nor ear heard,
what God has prepared for those who love Him" (1 Cor. 2:9).

Now the workshop
in which we shall diligently execute all these tasks
is the enclosure of the monastery
and stability in the community.

This ends lengthy Chapter 4 of the Rule. There is a plethora of items we could focus on today, considering it's a list of Christian values that are more or less difficult for each of us to carry out; yet we'll not be spending time with those. No, today's focus is on the last paragraph. The last two lines leap out as us almost like an accusation, as if to say, "you Lay Cistercians are frauds." Hey, not so fast there, Benedict-like accuser. What about Benedictine Oblates? They keep the rule and they don't live in the enclosure of the monastery.

I'm making a case out of this because some people are so literal minded that those lines could prevent them from taking a next step into any type of lay association. In the context of Lay Cistercian living we must keep in mind that our local lay community is the enclosure. What happens in our local enclosure, stays in our enclosure, if you will forgive the pun on the Las Vegas commercial. Yet it is true. In each local community we share some of the deepest parts of our selves, and our lives, things not meant to be spread about to the outside world.

Each of the tools that have been listed over the last three days prepare us for the meeting of our confrères, as the Trappists say, and that we, as well as they, are able to call us to account for good deeds, and our bad deeds. I know that in my local lay community we have discussed how we are not a support group, or a therapy group, we are a group of people committed to a life grounded in the values of the Cistercians and the Rule. When we cross lines, it is we ourselves who must pull one another back and say, "no, that breaks the rule."

More than a hundred people feel called to be Lay Cistercians of Gethsemani Abbey, and for them in their local community, even if it is by phone, must live out the Charism as it has been handed down to us by the witness of the Monastic community of the Abbey. That is our stability.