St. Benedict
One
Today is the Feast of St Benedict, the founder of the Benedictine religious order, but I’ll bet you never knew this - St. Benedict was never a priest! In fact, he never intended on starting a religious order. What he intended was to give everyone a new way in which they could live life.
When Benedict was 20, he moved to Rome (around the year 500) to go to college. And he looked around at the world and saw that everyone’s lives were out of control. Benedict was just a layperson who looked at the world and said, “This is crazy! I don’t want to live this way!”
So he moved to Subiaco and started to live a simple way of life. That simple life was so attractive that people began to gather around him and he formed them into twelve small communities. This was the beginning of the Benedictine order, based on a simple way of life called a rule of life.
Do you desire a simple way of life that will lead to happiness and peace?
Two
God designed every person to need certain good things on a daily basis to be happy.
We want those ingredients in the right order and the right proportion. The three main ingredients for a simple way of life are:
Love of God
Love of neighbor
And love of self
Mother Teresa famously summarized it with JOY: Jesus, Others, and You.
One could say that the love of God is comprised of sharing in His Life through the Sacraments regularly and by a deep friendship with Him in daily mental prayer.
Love of neighbor is comprised of either doing good for others in your family, work, and friendships.
Finally, the love of self consists of taking care of yourself physically and psychologically, of feeding your soul with truth, and beauty.
Three
Loving God
The most important thing we need to be happy is to love God. We love God by worshiping and adoring Him in the Mass and receiving Him in the Eucharist.
Love is to do some good for someone. But what does God need? What does God want? A relationship with you. And that’s prayer. Prayer is to spend time in friendship with God every day, talking to Him from the heart, listening to Him in silence, and just being with Him.
If you were to have coffee with a friend, how much time would you allot? At least an hour! And if you really liked that friend, you could talk to them for hours.
So if we’re really serious about friendship with God, we’ll give Him at least thirty minutes a day of our undivided attention.
The rosary podcast is a good place to start but let God draw you into more time with Him.
Four
Loving others
We love others by doing good for them in our families, in our work, with our friends, and with the poor.
We can do great good for others through our work. The purpose of work is not to make more cash or gain more power or give you access to what you want. The purpose of work is to make the world a better place.
Every person has a superpower – some way to do good for others. You may get paid for it or you may not. But the value of work is not based on pay – its value is doing good for others.
That is why we should do some kind of work, whether in the home or outside of it, until we die.
Love, or doing good for others, needs to be applied first to the family. In order to love them well, we must know them well, otherwise, how will we know what good can be done for them? Therefore, the first thing we must do is spend time, one on one, getting to know and understand each person in our family.
But we will have to devote time daily to this.
Finally, through the corporal and spiritual works of mercy, we love the poor.
And of course, all of this should be applied to your friends, but if you don’t take the initiative, then you won’t have friendships.
Five
If we want to be happy, we must also love ourselves.
And if to love is to do good for another, in this case, to do good for ourselves, then what goods do we need?
Our body needs good nutrition, sleep, exercise, and hygiene (which is also a corporal work of mercy).
But because we are body and soul and the soul is comprised of the intellect, passions, and will, we also need to feed them with truth in the form of knowledge, beauty, and goodness or virtue.
Benedict gave his followers a rule, a recipe, a structure to get in these three ingredients (love of God, love of neighbor and love of self) each day. And they didn’t waste any time staring at blank stone walls or watching grass grow, which is the ancient equivalent of staring at our screens all day.
We need a recipe with the right ingredients, the right proportion, and the right order. Take a look at your life. You may have too much of one ingredient, too little of others, and you may have some wrong ingredients. You might even have some poison in your recipe.
So what’s in your recipe?