Ash Wednesday
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February 14, 2018“Learn from me for I am gentle and humble of heart…Take my yoke upon you for my yoke is easy and my burden is light.” These words from Matthew are echoed by St. Benedict in his Prologue when he states, “Therefore we intend to establish a school for the Lord’s service. In drawing up its regulations, we hope to set down nothing harsh, nothing burdensome.” In this school we respond to Jesus’ invitation to learn both his gentleness and humility, a curriculum that St. Benedict develops very carefully in his long chapter on humility. This is what I would like to give my attention to during my Lenten Chapter talks.
“The first step of humility is that a monk always keeps the fear of God before his eyes and flees from all forgetfulness.” The eyes, both ours and God’s, are a central image in this step, and we should fill out the imagery by the scriptural contexts rather than by simply staying with the strange and incomplete idea of ourselves always seen by God and of our actions reported to him by angels at every hour. What is the context? Psalm 139, a verse of which is quoted here by Benedict, touches upon it in its beautiful realization of God’s unending search for us: “O Lord, you have searched me and known me…You search out my path and my lying down and are acquainted with all my ways…Yours eyes beheld my unformed substance; in your book were written, every one of them, the days that were formed for me.” Sirach 23 also gives a context for the all seeing eyes: “The eyes of the Lord are ten thousand times brighter than the sun, they look on every aspect of human behavior…Nothing is better than fear of the Lord and nothing is sweeter than to heed the Lord’s commandments.” Suddenly the eyes of the Lord upon us appear overwhelmingly beautiful and caring, powerful and truthful. His watchfulness of our interior becomes the incentive for our own watchfulness and, in fact, the great tradition of the Desert Fathers who faced the world of their interior with all its lights and shadows, was born from this. They called this practice “nepsis.” In Father Bernard Bonowitz’s description of it we can see how closely related it is to the first step of humility: “To be a spiritual creature is to receive a responsibility to persevere in one’s spiritual identity by a constant awareness of it and a constant fidelity to it. When we look inside ourselves without retaining the inward recollection of who we are, we run the risk of acting contrary to our nature or of letting the evil one slip into that central place of our heart and there exert an influence. This, by the way, is the basis for all monastic teaching about custody of the senses which, rather than being a dubious ascetical-penitential practice, is an essential contemplative activity---a 24-hour-a-day contemplative activity.”
Thus the most relevant characteristics of holy fear or fear of the Lord are mindfulness and what Michael Casey calls “seriousness”, that is, a disposition of taking life seriously. The opposite disposition is one of heedlessness, forgetfulness, distraction. Every hour, every place, each action counts, each thought counts---that is, each deliberate thought. As Michael Casey puts it again, “Every act has eternal significance and eternal consequences.” You could really say that fear of the Lord is the first step of prayer as well as the first step of humility because it forms us in such attentiveness to God. May we all give ourselves earnestly to this practice each day of our lives and give a special effort to it this Lent through more time for prayer, lectio, silence and interior thoughtfulness.