Instruction 
Instruction on the Rule by noteworthy modern day monastics or oblates
Virtue is Sacred
If we see virtue as simply the right way to live, no matter what the cost, then virtue is sacred. Virtue is the door into the sacred sanctuary because virtue is not a consumer product; it is not just a refuge from our anxieties nor a pause from a busy life; not something we can… Read More ›
God does help the blessed
Now even though we may have faith, hope and love, none of us can attain this state of blessedness by ourselves. Rather, blessed is the man – he alone attains blessedness – whose help is from you in rising to the heights of happiness on which he has set his heart. In other words, he… Read More ›
The Great Christian Task of Our Time
Prayers and sacrifice must be used as the most effective spiritual weapons in the war against war, and like all weapons they must be used with deliberate aim: not just with a vague aspiration for peace and security, but against violence and against war. This implies that we are also willing to sacrifice and restrain… Read More ›
Have the Courage to Let Things Go
One of the chief obstacles to the perfection of selfless charity, is the selfish anxiety to get the most out of everything, to be a brilliant success in our own eyes and in the eyes of other men. We can only get rid of this anxiety by being content to miss something in almost everything… Read More ›
Benedictines: Lovers of the book
[For followers of St. Benedict]. . .Part of their vocation, it seems to me, is to be lovers of the book. Someone absorbed in reading is a beautiful sight, as many great paintings attest. Observing, we become aware of a certain stillness of the body and quietness of mind in the reader, a concentration of… Read More ›
Freedom of Choice
Freedom of choice is not, itself, the perfection of liberty. But it helps us take our first step toward freedom or slavery, spontaneity or compulsion. The free man is the one whose choices have given him the power to stand on his own feet and determine his own life according to the higher light and… Read More ›
A Life Built on Radical Untruth
Many people regard religion as something foreign or even hostile to human nature. As a result, religion becomes a matter of social conformity, duty, and guilt: it is life-denying. There seems little in it that leads to the joyous fulfillment of natural aspirations. Any sort of religious activity can easily be seen as in some… Read More ›
To be Born Again is to Become Ourselves
There is in us an instinct for newness, for renewal, for a liberation of creative power. We seek to awaken in ourselves a force which really changes our lives from within. And yet the same instinct tells us that this change is a recovery of that which is deepest, most original, most personal in ourselves…. Read More ›
The Purpose of Education: True Freedom
The purpose of education is to show us how to define ourselves authentically and spontaneously in relation to our world — not to impose a prefabricated definition of the world, still less an arbitrary definition of ourselves as individuals. The world is made up of the people who are fully alive in it: that is,… Read More ›
The Value of True Humility
It is almost impossible to overestimate the value of true humility and its power in the spiritual life. For the beginning of humility is the beginning of blessedness and the consummation of humility is the perfection of all joy. Humility contains in itself the answer to all the great problems of the life of the… Read More ›