Chapter 4 of the Rule brings us abruptly from aspiration to action. Benedict has described the monastery; now he places the tools in our hands and invites us to begin....
...with love!
Love God. Love your neighbor. Do no harm to another. Renounce yourself in order that you may follow Christ...
...surrender!
There is something profound in the order. Benedict does not first call us to extraordinary prayer, heroic asceticism, or spiritual achievement. He calls us first to justice—to right relationship: with God, with the other, and with ourselves.
This very well may require the most valiant kind of monastic heart:
one willing to set out each morning to find the holy hidden within the other.
Contemplation, then, cannot mean simply learning to see God in some distant spiritual realm. It must teach us to recognize the living Christ standing before us—in the difficult person, the forgotten person, the poor person, the person whose needs inconvenience our own. The spiritual life must be lived today—now.
Surrendering does not mean despising yourself. It means surrender the tyranny of the self—the instinct that insists that my comfort, my preference, my schedule, my security must always come first. Benedict becomes strikingly practical: do not pamper yourself; relieve the lot of the poor, serve the other.
There it is. Prayer becomes compassion. Contemplation becomes service. Love becomes something we do.
We are called to participate in the great Christian enterprise of acting for others in the place of God—becoming, however imperfectly, the hands through which Christ touches other lives.
Perhaps that is the workshop Benedict is building in Chapter 4.
The tools are before us.
The person beside us is waiting.
And this is where we must live.
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