Yes...

Benedict’s vision of leadership is demanding precisely because it refuses to make the leader responsible for another person’s response. The leader must teach, proclaim, model, warn, encourage, and create a community in which the search for God is possible. But ultimately, each person must listen and choose.

Perhaps spiritual leadership can be described this simply: show them the mountain, point toward the path, and let them go.

The difficulty is that we begin our journey carrying a moral frame of reference shaped largely by the secular world around us. It is weak, incomplete, and sometimes unwilling to surrender its assumptions. Into that frame we must patiently build the moral vision of Christ—not merely by learning rules, but through prayer, Scripture, meditation, contemplation, reflection, and above all, listening.

“Pray without ceasing” becomes less an instruction to speak endlessly to God than an invitation to live continually attentive to God.

There will also be times when the dazzling light and flame of the living Christ seems hidden. Spiritual leadership then requires the courage to seek that light, recognize it in unexpected places, and proclaim what we have found. The leader cannot manufacture the flame. The leader can only keep searching for it and point others toward its light.

Yet Benedict never permits this emphasis on personal responsibility to become individualism. We are accountable for ourselves, but we are also responsible for the environment we create for others. Our words, attitudes, patience, judgments, and love either make the road toward God easier to see or obscure it.

Cain asked, “Am I my brother’s keeper?” The Gospel answers the question.

Yes.

We cannot walk the path for another. But we can make certain that, through us, they can see the mountain.