To live no longer for ourselves but for Christ: this is what gives full meaning to the life of those who let themselves be conquered by him. This is clearly demonstrated by the human and spiritual life of St Benedict who, having abandoned all things, set out to follow Jesus Christ faithfully. Embodying the Gospel in his life, he became the pioneer of a vast movement of spiritual and cultural rebirth in the West.
I would like here to mention an extraordinary event in his life related by St Gregory the Great, his biographer, and which is certainly well known to you. One might almost say that the holy Patriarch was also “carried up into Heaven” in an indescribable mystic experience. On the night of 29 October 540, we read in the biography, while leaning out of the window, “his eyes fixed on the stars and wrapt in divine contemplation, the Saint felt that his heart was burning… for him the starry firmament was like the embroidered curtain that veiled the Holy of Holies. At a certain point, his soul felt transported to the other side of the veil, to contemplate unveiled the Face of the One who dwells in inaccessible brightness” (cf. A.I. Schuster, Storia di san Benedetto e dei suoi tempi, Ed. Abbazia di Viboldone, Milan, 1965, p. 11 and ff.). Of course, similarly to what happened for Paul after he had been taken up into Heaven, for St Benedict too subsequent to this extraordinary spiritual experience, a new life had to begin. Indeed, although the vision was but fleeting the effects endured, his features themselves, the biographers say, were altered by it, his expression always remained serene and his behaviour angelic and although he lived on earth it was obvious that his heart was already in Paradise.
St Benedict did not of course receive this divine gift to satisfy his intellectual curiosity, but rather so that the charism with which God had endowed him might enable him to reproduce in the monastery the very life of Heaven ven and to re-establish the harmony of creation through contemplation and work. Rightly, therefore, the Church venerates him as an “eminent teacher of monastic life” and a “doctor of spiritual wisdom in his love of prayer and work”; a luminous “guide of the peoples to the light of the Gospel” who, “lifted up to Heaven on a shining path”, teaches men and women of all the epochs to seek God and the eternal riches prepared by him (cf. Preface of the Saint in the monastic supplement to MR, 1980, 153).
Pope Benedict XVI
Celebration of Second Vespers of the Ascension with the
Benedictine Abbots and Communities of Monks and Nuns
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BrqCnRn3GGo
