Never surrender goodness as we strive for good....

There is something quietly unsettling in Chapter 70. Benedict is not simply telling members of the monastery not to strike one another. He is confronting something much more subtle and much more dangerous: the human temptation to believe that being right gives us permission to do wrong.

Sister Joan reveals this simple truth with extraordinary clarity: “The desire for good is no excuse for the exercise of evil in its behalf.”

Most of us do not deliberately set out to become cruel, vindictive, controlling, or dismissive. Quite the contrary. Striving for good, we seek justice. We want truth. We want to protect the community. Yes, we frequently want someone corrected. We want things done properly. We may even believe we are defending God, morality, tradition, country, church, family, or another person.

And therein lies the danger.

For once we become convinced of the righteousness of our cause, it becomes remarkably easy to excuse the violence that may follow.

We begin to justify the cutting remark because someone needed to say it.
We humiliate because they deserved to be corrected.
We exclude because they are causing trouble.
We refuse to listen because we know what is right.
We attack another person's character while telling ourselves we are defending the truth.

The blows Benedict forbids need not be delivered by the hand.

Benedictine spirituality offers another way. It insists that the manner in which we seek the good must itself be good. We cannot create peace through hatred. Community cannot be built through humiliation. Truth cannot be served by cruelty. We must not defend love through hate.

The means are not incidental to the spiritual life. The means are the spiritual life.

This is why Sister Joan's warning is so profound: to become what we hate is neither the goal nor the greatness of the spiritual life.

The great spiritual danger is not simply that hatred exists somewhere outside us. It is that, in opposing hatred, we may slowly permit hatred to enter us.

And then the enemy has won.

The Benedictine way asks use to:

• stand for truth—but do not cease loving;
• resist injustice—but do not surrender your soul to hatred;
• correct when correction is necessary—but never forget the sacred humanity of the person before you.

The victory of the spiritual life is not merely
overcoming evil, it is confronting evil without allowing
evil to teach us how to live.

Pray for humanity and all the nations of this world....