The Vows of our Oblation seem to bind, but in reality they
set us free.
In making an Oblation of our lives
in the context of an Abbey or Monastery, the Oblation, a gentle vow, gives us
freedom from ourselves, from distractions, from emotional ups and downs, and
from unbalanced fervor and dryness. We
make our Oblation in the context of a specific community but also in the
context of the state of life in which we are called. That state of life affects the pattern of
spirituality that develops, but my own observation is that it should not
determine it. The Rule of Life that
springs from our Oblation calls us out of our everyday existence into the
Presence of God.
What St. Benedict says is, “At the
hour for Divine Office, as soon as the signal is heard, let them abandon
whatever they may have in hand and hasten (to prayer) with greatest speed, yet
with seriousness, so that there is no excuse for levity. Let nothing be put before the Work of God.”1
It is very
difficult to drop everything “when the bell rings.” What makes it even more difficult is the call
to establish our own rhythm, to discipline ourselves. In effect we have to decide when the bell
should ring. What is often called into
question by the Rule are our priorities.
Work is hard to set aside, but so also is accidie - that mingling of despondency and listlessness so clearly
identified in The Sayings of the Desert
Fathers. John Cassian describes it this way,
He looks about anxiously this way
and that, and sighs that none of the brethren come to see him, and often goes
in and out of his cell, and frequently gazes up at the sun, as if it was too
slow in setting, and so a kind of unreasonable confusion of mind takes
possession of him like some foul darkness.2
To us today accidie appears as depression and its resulting sluggishness. Abba Poeman says, “Accidie is there
every time one begins something, and there is no worse passion, but if a man
recognizes it for what it is, he will gain peace.”3 In later times accidie
was too simplistically referred to as laziness or sloth, but its original
meaning was closer to the way it was used by the Desert Fathers.
Ultimately whether or not accidie
is regarded as despondency and listlessness, or as laziness, the cure for it
rests in taking action, not on the basis of sudden inspiration, but in taking
action as a fulfillment of a Rule of Life that springs from our Oblation.
The late medieval mystic Van
Ruysbroek reminds us that "love cannot be lazy"4 The
antidote for accidie, whether it is despondency and listlessness, or sloth and
laziness, is action.
St. Benedict himself says,
“Idleness is the enemy of the soul.”5 Part of the state in which all
of us find ourselves is enmeshed in the dynamic principle of the second law of
thermodynamics, “heat flows from a higher to a lower temperature but that it
does not do the reverse.” In a spiritual
context that means that, when you are a week away from a retreat, spiritual
energy tends to cool off unless it is sustained by the balance provided by a
Rule of Life. The Rule of Life should be
strong enough to provide an adequate challenge, but not so strong as to be
unattainable. As St. Benedict says,
“that the strong may have something to strive for and the weak nothing to run
from.”6
I also note that it seems to be a
spiritual principle that God expects us to do more than we expect ourselves to
do. That has a direct application to our
Oblation. In my experience He always
tends to be right.
1The Rule of St. Benedict, Chapter 43.
2John Cassian, The Institutes, (Boniface Ramsey,
tr.)
3Benedicta Ward, The Sayings of the Desert Fathers, (Kalamazoo:
Cistercian Publications, 1975), p. 188
4 Jan Van Ruysbroeck, The Sparkling Stone, The Library of Christian Classics, Late
Medieval Mysticism, ed. Ray C. Petry, (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press,
1957), 308
5Rule, Ch. 48.
6Rule, Ch. 64.
