Living With Contradiction. Esther de Waal

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      What follows in this book takes the form of meditations which I originally gave at the ‘Benedictine Experience’ weeks which first started when I was living in Canterbury and have since then spread widely elsewhere. The pattern of our time together was shaped by an attempt to live out that daily rhythm which is fundamental to St Benedict's recognition that we are all made up of body, mind and spirit and that due attention must be paid to each of these elements. So there was time for prayer, study and work, all set within the saying of the daily offices, the opus Dei. There was time to be alone and time to be with others, time for silence and time for recreation.

      The week worked at two levels. It was an individual experience in which each participant learnt more about himself or herself and tried to carry that humane balance back into their working lives. But it was also a shared, corporate experience of making a temporary community out of people of very different backgrounds and religious denominations – and in the case of South Africa, of different race. So right at the start we were already living out one of the insights of the Rule: unless we learn to live with ourselves we cannot live with others. But equally, unless and until we have leant to live fully and creatively with others we cannot hope to live with our own selves. We had to face the tension of that constant inward, outward movement which is one of the inescapable contradictions of all our lives.

      It is the daily exploration of the themes of the Rule, in the form of meditations rather than as discussion or teaching, that has formed this book. They are set out very much as I originally delivered them. I hope that they will be read prayerfully and reflectively just as the original talks were meant to be heard prayerfully and reflectively. This means reading them slowly, which is not a natural accomplishment of the twentieth century, where the ruminative reading of an earlier age is no longer familiar. Sometimes the same themes or the same images will appear and re-appear, and this is intentional. This is after all what I find in the Rule itself, which the longer that I have stayed with it, the more I have come to appreciate how like a tapestry it is, and how one can be drawn first by one thread and then by another.

      At each successive stage in my life I have found in St Benedict a guide and support as I turn to him with new demands and new questions in a life whose contradictions and complexities have not – as I expected when I was younger – decreased as time goes on. My wish is that these reflections will enable others to find in the Rule the same practical help and gentle guidance that I have found. For St Benedict is always gentle, nurturing, sensitive to each one of us as the uniquely individual person that we are. There is no technology here to threaten, no system to be acquired or mastered. Instead he shows us how to live with a succession of opening doors. He shows us how to live with contradictions: he does not tell us that they will necessarily be resolved.

      These pages follow and I hope deepen what I was trying to do in an earlier book, Seeking God: the Way of St Benedict in which I tried to show the profound difference that my encounter with the Rule made on my life. Since then I have travelled widely and have been warmly received as a sister in Christ by numberless communities of Benedictine men and women, and I owe an immense debt to the many sustaining and stimulating monastic friendships all over the world which have grown from that. But in the last resort this is a book written by a lay woman for other laypeople. It is a very personal attempt to show how St Benedict continues to be inspiration and mentor, supporting me and challenging me, on my own Christian journey. I hope that it will lead others to discover this man and his Rule for themselves. It is for that reason that I have included as the start of the book the Prologue which is like the overture to a great orchestral work setting out all the main themes which are to follow. Here St Benedict gives us some of the most memorable passages and the most lyrical of phrases of his writing. And so I find myself saying ‘the ear of your heart’; ‘a school for the Lord's service’; ‘nothing harsh, nothing burdensome’; ‘our hearts overflowing with the inexpressible delight of love’; but above all, ‘See how the Lord in his love shows us the way of life’.

      ESTHER DE WAAL

      1997