Rule 
Articles and posts specifically teaching the Rule of St. Benedict. Articles divided into two categories: Benedictine Wisdom, the teaching of the Benedictine Fathers; and Instruction, teaching by more modern day Benedictine scholars.
Delusion must be refused
In proportion as he becomes authentically aware of his own plight, man confronts the absurd — and finds it not in himself or in the objective world, but “in their presence together.” Whereas he seeks to understand himself and his world by reason, he finds that the “only bond” between himself and the world is… Read More ›
What is Success?
A few years ago a man who was compiling a book entitled Success wrote and asked me to contribute a statement on how I got to be a success. I replied indignantly that I was not able to consider myself a success in any terms that had a meaning to me. I swore I had… Read More ›
The city itself lives on its own myth
The city itself lives on its own myth. Instead of waking up and silently existing, the city people prefer a stubborn and fabricated dream; they do not care to be a part of the night, or to be merely of the world. They have constructed a world outside the world, against the world, a world… Read More ›
Foolish people at the mercy selling happiness
If we are fools enough to remain at the mercy of the people who want to sell us happiness, it will be impossible for us ever to be content with anything. How would they profit if we became content? We would no longer need their new product. The last thing the salesman wants is for… Read More ›
The Real Source of Violence
The population of the affluent world is nourished on a steady diet of brutal mythology and hallucination, kept at a constant pitch of high tension by a life that is intrinsically violent in that it forces a large part of the population to submit to an existence which is humanly intolerable. . . . The… Read More ›
Concerning popular religion…
Popular religion has to a great extent betrayed man’s inner spirit and turned him over, like Samson, with his hair cut off and his eyes dug out, to turn the mill of a self-frustrating and self-destroying culture. The cliches of popular religion have in many cases become every bit as hollow and as false as… Read More ›
It is the question of a game
“Businesses, are, in reality, quasi-religious sects. When you go to work in one, you embrace A New Faith. And if they are really big businesses, you progress from faith to a kind of mystique. Belief in the product, preaching the product, in the end the product becomes the focus of a transcendental experience. Through ‘the… Read More ›
Sunday Chapter talk on humility
You can’t escape the journey that is our lives. If it is attempted things usually get worse. That goes for life in the secular world as well as for those who are in religious and monastic life. Below is a talk I presented to the community at Sunday Chapter on an aspect of Humility as… Read More ›
Not Only for Monks: Bernard of Clairvaux’s Monastic Sermons
As a Cistercian abbot, St. Bernard of Clairvaux (1090-1153) had the responsibility of teaching monks through commentary on the Rule of Benedict and Scripture. In partially meeting this responsibility the founder of Clairvaux Abbey, and subsequently named Doctor of the Church, wrote more than 700 sermons in his life. Monastic Sermons, translated by Daniel Griggs… Read More ›
The work of purification: Loving others
Very few men are sanctified in isolation. Very few become perfect in absolute solitude. Living with other people and learning to lose ourselves in the understanding of their weakness and deficiencies can help us to become true contemplatives. For there is no better means of getting rid of the rigidity and harshness and coarseness of… Read More ›