Benedictine spirituality shapes the Community of Hope.
What is Benedictine spirituality?
Benedictine spirituality is a way of life that helps a person to seek God and His will daily. It encourages a life balance between corporate worship, spiritual reading and work in the context of community. People are seen as an integrated whole: Body, Mind, and Spirit. Core values in Benedictine spirituality are stability, obedience (to God), personal transformation, humility, and hospitality, care of the ill, living a life style of love centered in Christ and listening for God in all of life.
“The Rule” offers guidelines for the ordering of life.
The guiding principles of Benedictine practice are found in the Rule of St. Benedict, a document authored in the fifth century as a guide for life in a Christian monastery. For The Community of Hope, the Rule is simply an aid for us to live by the Scriptures. The primary concern of the Rule is to confront us as forcefully as possible with the Gospel and its demands. The major themes of community, prayer, hospitality, study, work, humility, stability, peace, and listening find expression in the way The Community of Hope is structured and lived.
The Life of St. Benedict
(c.480 - c.547)
Never was the condition of of church and state in Europe so sadly deplorable as the era when St. Benedict was born. All bonds of order seemed dissolved, and civil laws and authorities done away with.
The saint was born in the year 480 at Nursia, a city in Southern Italy, to a noble Roman family. After passing his childhood years, his parents placed him in the schools of Rome for an education in fine arts. This led to a turning point in his life. When he saw many of his companions in the great metropolis giving themselves up to vice, he was led to heed the call of God and flee from the world and its corruption. He left Rome at age 14 to seek salvation and perfection in solitude.
Living a solitary life for three years in a cave near Subiaco, Benedict was given the vision to start a monastery. Leaving the cave, Benedict later formed small monasteries of 12 monks or more. In this period he wrote his famous Rule for monks, distinguished for its discretion and clarity of thought. In 73 chapters he regulates the entire monastic life by combining the principles of the Gospel into a clear, concise set of guidelines for monastic life. Millions of people in the years since, both inside monasteries and out in the wider world, have befitted from applying the simple, Christ-centered prinicples of the Rule to their own lives.
St. Benedict, the great Patriarch of Western monks, died March 21, 547 in the church where he daily had sung the praises and celebration of the Sacred Mystery. His remains are resting in the church of St. John the Baptist at Monte Casino. In the course of years, numerous miracles have glorified his tomb.