Wednesday 3rd Week in Lent

In the Prologue of his Rule, St Benedict uses a striking phrase about the monastic life, and it’s something that can apply to every Christian life. We even sing it in our liturgy. It begins like this: “As we go forward in our monastic life and in faith, let our hearts be enlarged”. When Benedict talks about going forward, he’s talking about a process of continuous conversion, of letting our hearts be enlarged. And our hearts can be enlarged if we continuously listen in faith to the Lord, just as the people listened to Moses in the first reading, when he said, “Now, Israel, hear the statutes and decrees which I am teaching you to observe, that you may live”.

Really live, and live by faith. A person whose faith is not very deep is often guided only by his own reason. He finds it very hard to be patient and calm and charitable to others when they trouble him unreasonably and do him wrong. But one who loves the Lord with all his heart discovers that it isn’t all that hard to put up with troublesome people, because Love with a capital L fights for him and destroys these moments of anger and bitterness. The awareness of God’s love makes a person more ready to bear all things with an interior consolation. He listens with faith to what our Lord says in today’s Gospel, “whoever obeys and teaches these
commandments will be called greatest in the Kingdom of heaven”.

And it is God’s love that brings all this about, because the love of God is what enlarges the heart and makes the person indifferent to what people say or do against him. So when a true lover of God suffers at the hands of others, he is strengthened through the grace of the Holy Spirit. If he responds to that grace, he can become so patient and calm that, whatever wrong or injury he suffers, he remains humble. He does not despise his persecutors or speak ill of them, but prays for them with more compassion than for those who never harmed him. And in fact he may even love them more, and praymore fervently for their salvation, because he knows that God can draw great spiritual good out of the evil that they do.

But this kind of love and humility is beyond human nature, and can only be brought about in us by the Holy Spirit, because only the Spirit can make us true lovers of God. Let us pray for his grace, that we may “run with unspeakable sweetness of love in the way of God’s commandments”. As St Benedict adds: “Never swerving from his instructions, then, but faithfully observing his teaching in the monastery until death, we shall through patience share in the sufferings of Christ, that we may deserve also to share in his kingdom.
Amen.”