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.
Pray Often and Read Often
For those who practice it, the experience of lectio sacra sharpens perception, enriches understanding, rouses from sloth, banishes idleness, orders life, corrects bad habits, produces salutary weeping and draws tears from contrite hearts . . . curbs idle speech and vanity, awakens longing for Christ and the heavenly homeland. It must always be accompanied by… Read More ›
The Heart Must Be Cleansed to See God
“Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God” (Mt 5:8). This is a great promise, my brothers, and something to be desired with all one’s heart. For to see in this way is to be like God, as John the Apostle says, “Now we are all sons of God, but it has… Read More ›
The General Dance
For the world and time are the dance of the Lord in emptiness. The silence of the spheres is the music of a wedding feast. The more we persist in misunderstanding the phenomena of life, the more we analyze them out into strange finalities and complex purposes of our own, the more we involve ourselves in… Read More ›
All is “Zero”
All has become one, all has become indifferent, all has been leveled to equal meaninglessness…. It is not that all is “one” but all is “zero.” Everything adds up to zero. Indeed, even the state, in the end, is zero. Freedom is then to live and die for zero. Is that what I want: to… Read More ›
Keep your head clear of static
Clearly, the “powers” and “elements” which in Paul’s day dominated men’s minds through pagan religion or through religious legalism, today dominate us in the confusion and the ambiguity of the Babel of tongues that we call mass-society. Certainly I do not condemn everything in the mass media. But how does one stop to separate the… Read More ›
The Blessing of God
Among the blessings of God, some are the blessings of creation, others of restoration, and others of day-to-day consolation. The blessings of creation are that we were created in the image and likeness of God, that in him we live and move and have our being and are his offspring, and that by his gift… Read More ›
The reason for inner confusion
I believe the reason for the inner confusion of Western man is that our technological society has no longer any place in it for wisdom that seeks truth for its own sake, that seeks the fullness of being, that seeks to rest in an intuition of the very ground of all being. Without wisdom, the… Read More ›
Technology was made for man, not man for technology
It is precisely this illusion, that mechanical progress means human improvement, that alienates us from our own being and our own reality. It is precisely because we are convinced that our life, as such, is better if we have a better car, a better TV set, better toothpaste, etc., that we condemn and destroy our… Read More ›
Start Over and Do It Well
It is not complicated to lead the spiritual life. But it is difficult. We are blind, and subject to a thousand illusions. We must expect to be making mistakes almost all the time. We must be content to fall repeatedly and to begin again to try to deny ourselves, for the love of God. It… Read More ›
The way we become irresponsible
That to start with one’s ego-identity and to try to bring that identity to terms with external reality by thinking, and then, having worked out practical principles, to act on reality from one privileged autonomous position in order to bring it into line with an absolute good we have arrived at by thought: this is… Read More ›