The courage to begin again....

July 6.  Life is full of false starts.

What a remarkably compassionate truth to find beneath Chapter 29. Benedict, writing fourteen centuries ago, seems already to understand something we spend lifetimes discovering: human beings are uncertain creatures. We hesitate. We choose and reconsider. We begin, lose heart, wander away, and sometimes return ashamed that we ever left.

Benedict makes room for this.

The brother who leaves may return. If he leaves again, Benedict permits another return—and even a third. Yet eventually a boundary is drawn.

Why?  Perhaps because there is a profound difference between searching and drifting.

The Desert Fathers understood this. Their lives were filled with beginnings and beginnings again. They struggled with anger, temptation, pride, boredom, and despair. Holiness was not their perfect record. Holiness was their willingness to return to the cell, return to prayer, return to God.

But eventually one must stay in the cell. That may be Benedict's deeper wisdom. We cannot spend our entire lives standing in the doorway asking whether this is the life we want. At some point, we must enter. 

We must give ourselves to something.

The philosophers came to much the same conclusion. Aristotle understood that character is formed through repeated action. We do not merely decide to become virtuous; our habits slowly form us into particular kinds of people. Kierkegaard recognized the danger of endless possibility. A life never chosen can become a life never truly lived.

This is where Sister Joan's words become profoundly provocative:

Eventually, we must all settle down and do something serious with our lives

and every day we must make a fresh beginning of it.

Notice the beautiful tension.

Settle down.
Begin again.

Commit.
And recommit.

Stay.
And start over.

This is not rigidity. It is stability of heart.

John Mark Comer speaks directly to our distracted age, reminding us that spiritual transformation requires intention, practices, and a rule of life. Richard Rohr approaches the same truth through contemplation: we must take a long, loving look at reality. But contemplation cannot become an endless examination of possibilities. Eventually, the inner life must become a lived life.

Reflection—but then movement.  Discernment—but then decision.  Grace for the false start—but eventually the courage to stay.

Perhaps the great spiritual danger is not that we will make the wrong beginning. God seems remarkably patient with wrong beginnings. Perhaps the greater danger is that we become so afraid of choosing imperfectly that we never give ourselves completely to anything.

We keep one hand on the door.

Benedict gently asks us to remove it.

Choose the life. Enter the cell. Begin the work. 
And when tomorrow comes, make a fresh beginning of it.

Perhaps this is conversatio morum at its deepest.