Sons of God. Obsculta, fili or Obsculta, o fili, Saint Benedict says [1]. Most translations mistranslate that. Usually the translations say, “Listen, my son.” That is not what Saint Benedict said. He said “Listen, O son.” He is speaking to us precisely in our dignity and reality as sons. We have been baptized into Christ, raised up to be sharers in the divine nature and life. It is precisely in sharing the sonship of Christ that we find our true dignity, our true reality. We are sons of God.
Knowing God as Father. Speaking about listening, we mention many times that we are all a certain listening, a certain openness to reality which has been shaped and formed by the whole of our lifetime experience. We each have a certain listening. That is why it can be so valuable when we sit together to share and discuss, each of us brings his own listening to it—what he has heard—so that we arrive at a fuller understanding of reality.
Each of us certainly has his own particular listening for the sonship. Each of us knows ourselves as a son, and each of us knows this in relation to our father. We bring this over into our relationship with God. We tend very much to see our relationship with God our Father as colored by our experience of our relationship with our own fathers. Whether it be our natural father, our adopted father, our step-father, and so on. This all colors that relationship we have with God the Father.
Jesus says, Will one of you hand your son a stone when he asks for a loaf or poisonous snake when he asks for a fish? If you with all your sins know how to give your children what is good, how much more will your Heavenly Father give good things to anyone who asks it? [2] Jesus uses the natural goodness that is in the father, that we have all experienced in varying degrees as children, as a step—an entrance—into an understanding of the goodness of God our Father. Yet, it is limited. All of us are not only poor, weak, stupid sinners but our fathers are also poor, weak, stupid sinners!
Part of coming to real maturity as men is to be able to accept this fact: our fathers and our mothers were, like ourselves, poor, weak, stupid sinners. We idolize our parents, so one of the shattering experiences of life is oftentimes when we come to find that they have their weaknesses, sins, faults, and failures, too. Our maturity is in being able to respect them and love them as the source of our life and be grateful for that, but fully accept them in that reality of their weaknesses and sinfulness. Because we are all poor, weak, stupid sinners, we are a very poor image of God.
A talk given on the Rule of Saint Benedict
by Abbot M. Basil Pennington, OCSO
Our Lady of the Holy Spirit Monastery
Thursday, March 8, 2001
