Copyright

William Collins

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First published in Great Britain in 2018 by William Collins

This edition published by arrangement with Hampton Roads Publishing Company, Inc. Charlottesville, VA 22906. Distributed by Red Wheel/Weiser, LLC

Copyright © 2019 by Judith Valente

Foreword copyright © 2018 Joan Chittister

Afterword copyright © 2018 Martin E. Marty

Judith Valente asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

Cover design by Heike Schuessler

Interior by Maureen Forys, Happenstance Type-O-Rama

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.

Source ISBN: 9780008308308

Ebook Edition © December 2019 ISBN: 9780008308292

Version: 2019-12-03

PRAISE FOR HOW TO LIVE

“This is a timely book for troubled times, showing how the values and practices established by St. Benedict in the 6th century can help us lead happier lives. A self-professed workaholic, the author allows the reader to see how her life has changed for the better since she took this ancient wisdom to heart.”

—KATHLEEN NORRIS, author of The Cloister Walk, Dakota: A Spiritual Geography, Acedia and Me, and Amazing Grace

“To have such a gifted writer live and report through the lens of The Rule of St. Benedict is a blessing for all of us. Judith Valente offers more than perspective. Her life’s work is monastic. To read, reflect, and report is the role of a professional journalist. As an author and journalist, Valente has The Rule of Benedict for her editor. What a gift for us.”

—MARY MARGARET FUNK, author of Thoughts Matter, Tools Matter, Humility Matters, and Out of the Depths

“Judith Valente has a knack for making the ancient Rule of St. Benedict come alive as a guidebook for today. With many examples and personal anecdotes, her presentation is insightful, delightful, and very honest. You will find yourself chuckling, but then checking to see where you’ve been hit.”

—JEROME KODELL, author of Don’t Trust the Abbot: Musings from the Monastery and Life Lessons from the Monastery

“Like all of Judith Valente’s writing, this beautiful actualization of The Rule of St. Benedict is accessible, inviting, challenging, inspiring, and wise. Even if you’ve never once set foot in a Benedictine monastery, this book will help you live a more contemplative and centered life in the busiest of worlds—your own.”

—JAMES MARTIN, SJ, author of Jesus: A Pilgrimage

“How to Live is a warm, inviting, and accessible introduction to the wisdom of Saint Benedict and its continuing relevance for our time. Whether you are new to The Rule or have been following the Benedictine path for many seasons, this book will enrich you with its insights and charm.”

—CARL MCCOLMAN, author of The Little Book of Christian Mysticism and Answering the Contemplative Call

“For those of you who suspect that it is “high time to rise from sleep” this book holds much promise. Filled with the practical wisdom of St. Benedict, it is a work that can help you discern ways to enrich your daily life. With keen insights into monastic living, the author shares her own journey of discovering that The Rule of Benedict is not just for monks.”

—MACRINA WIEDERKEHR, author of Seven Sacred Pauses

Dedication

For Thomasita Homan, OSB, who brought me to The Rule.

And, as always, for my husband, Charley.

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Praise for How to Live

Dedication

Acknowledgments

Foreword

1. Yearning for Life: On Beginning

2. Listen with the Ear of the Heart: On Paying Attention

3. Run with the Light: On Waking Up

4. Is There Life Before Death? On Living Fully

5. The Tools for Good Works: On Peaceful Living

6. Restraint of Speech: On Silence

7. “Have Patience with Me”: On Humility

8. The Times for Saying Alleluia: On Prayer

9. Sleeping with Knives: On Trust

10. Linking Arms: On Community

11. Workaholism and Over-Achieverism: On Finding Balance

12. To Make Amends: On Forgiving

13. The Guests at Our Door: On Hospitality

14. Do I Need This Now? On Living Simply

15. Seeking the True Self: On Facing Our Faults

16. Summoning the Community for Counsel: On Building Consensus

17. The Care of Souls: To Be a Leader

18. Nothing Is to Be Neglected: On Caring for What We Have

19. “Your Blessing, Please”: On Living with Awe

20. A School for the Lord’s Service: On Finding Meaning in Our Work

21. “I’ve Never Been Where I Am Not”: On Contemplation

22. Always Beginning: On Conversatio Morum

Afterword

About this Book

About the Author

About the Publisher

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I wish to express gratitude to Lisa Breger and Annie Parker for being early readers of the manuscript; Mary Lou Kownacki, OSB, Mary Ellen Plumb, OSB, and Anne McCarthy, OSB for reviewing the manuscript for accuracy; Joan Chittister, OSB for her insightful introduction; Kathleen Norris, Macrina Wiederkehr, OSB, and Mary Margaret Funk, OSB for their inspirational work on The Rule; Jane Hagaman of Red Wheel/Weiser and Addie Talbott for their careful editing; Greg Brandenburgh of Hampton Roads Publishing, without whose vision the book would not be possible; my agent, Amanda Annis of Trident Literary Agency, for her unwavering belief in this project; Ray Clem of Atchison for his cheerful support of me and all things Benedictine; the Benedictine sisters of Mount St. Scholastica for modeling The Rule for me; and my beautiful husband, Charles Reynard, for being my best editor and best friend.

Editor’s Note: The epigraphs in this book are all taken from The Rule of St. Benedict. The chapter titles are noted in each one.

Translations of The Rule are adapted from A Reader’s Version of The Rule of St. Benedict in Inclusive Language. Edited by Marilyn Schauble, OSB and Barbara Wojciak, OSB. Benetvision. 1989.

FOREWORD

The United States, young and bustling, new to the world, and racing to become something fresh and meaningful, is impatient with age. We are a living experiment in innovation and uniqueness. Europe and other older civilizations, on the other hand, are studies in transformation and tradition. They don’t bulldoze the past to put up something new; they build on it from within and in the process make way for the new even as they preserve the old. Clearly, the underlying difference between the character of American cities and the cast and quality of European cities is obvious: it is the way each of these cultures deals with time.

The distinction is worth contemplating on more levels than one. The lesson to be considered here has as much to do with spiritual awareness as it does with architecture. It has something to tell us about the way we all view time.

Time is a continuum of empty ages filled only by the substance we bring to it ourselves. The temptation of every age is to discount the old, to worship at the shrine of the new. But the value of time lies as much in what we ourselves bring to the understanding of time as it does in what time brings to us. It is our awareness and interpretations of time that determine our own place in the development of the human spirit, of the spiritual impact of yesterday on tomorrow.

The deep down spiritual truth is that time is always and forever an invitation to growth. Whether the wisdom of the ages shapes us, or not, determines the nature of our civilization, the depth of our culture, the spiritual filter through which we ourselves, in our own time, mold the character of the world around us. If, as individuals, we understand time as the storehouse of our souls, explore it for answers to perennial questions, and test it for its value, then we stand to become the bearers of the wisdom of the ages. If not, we simply join the ranks of societies before us that walked through life untouched by time. We become one more excursion through epochs we failed to fathom, and so end devoid of the substance they were meant to bring us.

And yet, if we make the effort to trace the chain of life and thought and ideals that have brought us as a people from one moment in history to another, we make ourselves part of the passage to a healthy tomorrow. We are prepared, then, to go in our own times—where there is no road—and leave a path.

This book helps us see what we are losing; to make us taste what we’re in danger of dismissing as unimportant. It reminds us of what we’ve missed but is still at hand, waiting to enliven the age in which we live as well as to be remembered for its contribution to the past.

This book, written in a period of political turmoil and personal angst, of national division and individual uncertainty, recalls us to the best of ourselves. It details for us the basis of good society. It brings us beyond the roiling headlines of the day to a consciousness of the little things that make for human community, healthy families, moral maturity, and personal peace and happiness.

But to do that, it takes us back to the thinking of the 6th century. It translates a moment of social upheaval for us and identifies a point of spiritual eruption, the impact of which still marks the world. Most importantly of all, it asks whether or not the ideas that lifted eras before us out of darkness might be exactly what we need now to restore our own best selves in the here and now.

The document this book expounds as a guide for modern living is Benedict of Nusia’s Rule for monastics. Written in the 6th century, it is still one of the preeminent spiritual treatises, a veritable guarantee of the good life. But why?

Because of its glorious, even extreme, asceticism? No, though it certainly models self-control.

Because of its rigorous prayer life? No, despite its commitment to regular and profound immersion in the mind of God.

Because of its demanding solitude and silence? Hardly, given all its concern for the upbuilding of the human community.

Then why? In a word: simplicity. Because of its attention to our undying desire to be truly happy. It describes for us what it takes to create genuine human community. It challenges us to find balance in the face of destructive competition. It encourages us to sharpen our commitment to cultivate the meaningful in life. It enables us to renew in ourselves the appreciation of humility in a world of narcissistic excess.

Or, to put it another way, it deals now, as then, with the likelihood of daily life to fray our nerves and wear down our early commitment to make everything in life a spiritual experience. Indeed, who among us does not need a spiritual path to lead us through the undergrowth of modern life, to heighten our consciousness of the sacred in the secular, to become whole?

Roman society knew the cost of war, the foolishness of debauchery, the stifling engorgement of excess on every level. Benedict’s simple rule of life became a template for living, authentic to the core and a guide to the highest of spiritual heights through the ages. Yet always simple. Always genuine. Always truly human.

This book takes us to the heart of life—our own as well as the ideas of others. Judith Valente gives us the opportunity to plot our own lives and struggles against that of an ancient spirituality that has been the basis of life for thousands in the last fifteen centuries and is a torch for many still.

It is a book worth reading. Better yet, it is a book worth thinking about.

—JOAN CHITTISTER, OSB, AUTHOR OF THE RULE OF BENEDICT

1
YEARNING FOR LIFE
On Beginning

Is there anyone here who yearns for life and desires to see good days?

—FROM THE PROLOGUE TO THE RULE OF ST. BENEDICT

This is a book about living. Not about surviving, but living a balanced, meaningful, and attentive life. It is like a traveler’s trunk that contains all the wisdom I wish I had acquired earlier in my life and seek now to pass on.

I can’t take credit for originating these ideas. They come from the mind of a teacher who lived more than fifteen hundred years ago. He originally wrote his guide, or Rule, for people living in a monastic community. Monasteries might seem like an unlikely source of wisdom for those of us living in the age of Instagram. And yet, this slender text has proved indispensable to people throughout the centuries seeking to live a saner, more peaceful life outside of a monastery. For me—a working journalist, an often overburdened professional, and a modern married woman—it has been a constant companion, never far from my work desk or nightstand.

The Rule of St. Benedict emerged from an era when a great civilization was under threat from violent outside forces. The economy favored the wealthy. Social norms were changing, and political leaders lacked the public’s trust. Many blamed their anxiety on government, foreigners, or those of a different religion or race. Sound like the nightly news? Welcome to Rome in the 6th century.

St. Benedict was not a priest or a religious official. He was, however, a leader—a young man disillusioned with the conflict, greed, injustice, and lack of compassion he saw around him. He believed the gospels offered a wiser, more consequential way to live. He called himself and his followers “monks,” from the Greek monos, meaning one. It signaled they had one goal, to seek God and forge a new kind of society with single-minded devotion. The society Benedict and his monks constructed rested firmly on counter-cultural pillars.

Buffeted by war, Benedict didn’t amass an army. He sought to build community. Instead of the false security of personal wealth, he endorsed the freedom of simplicity. His solution to daily threats of violence was to counsel his monks to sleep without their knives. To cope with the chaos around him, he embraced silence. He said: Replace grumbling with a sense of gratitude. Start each day with praise. Seek the common good and your own well-being will follow.

Community. Simplicity. Humility. Hospitality. Gratitude. Praise. These are the pillars of Benedictine spirituality. These are the things that matter. This is perhaps what we’ve forgotten.

Often it feels as though a genie of discord has escaped into the very air we breathe, liberating us to be our worst selves. We just have to read the news. A group of young men convene near the US White House, chanting “Heil victory, Heil our people,” and raise the fisted Nazi salute. African-American middle school students are greeted with shouts of “Go back to Africa.” Strangers pull off the head scarves of Muslim women out shopping. Gay men hear taunts of “faggot” in the street. White supremacists bearing guns, clubs, and torches march in the center of American cities.

The Rule of St. Benedict invites an alternative vision. It is summed up in a single line from one of the shortest chapters in The Rule: “The Good Zeal of Monastics.” Try to be the first to show respect to the other, supporting with the greatest patience one another’s weaknesses of body or behavior. This is the good St. Benedict says we are called to model. He asks us to nurture it zealously, with fervent love.

One of the most critically acclaimed fantasy films in recent years was a piece of science fiction called The Arrival. It is the story of beings from outer space who arrive on earth, igniting a wildfire of fear across the planet. Their language is unlike anything spoken or written, and it includes a unique perception of time. An expert linguist is tapped to initiate contact. If she cannot draw out the visitors’ true intentions, the nations of the world will pool their weaponry and launch an all-out assault.

To show her own peaceful motives, the linguist enters the spacecraft, and at considerable risk to herself, removes her biohazard suit. She approaches the strange, multi-limbed creatures with palms open and outstretched. Her body language demonstrates she isn’t there to attack. Slowly, by immersing herself in the aliens’ language, she uncovers their purpose. Earth escapes an interplanetary disaster, not by superior weaponry or even acts of daring, but by bravely communicating with those we don’t at first understand. Success through empathy. In many ways, the film mirrors the parallel society the Benedictine Rule calls us to forge. One where the ability to listen, to communicate, and ultimately to understand delivers us from self-destruction.

“Who will dwell in your tent, O God? Who will find rest in your holy mountain? (Ps 15:1) …” “Those who walk without blemish and are just in all dealings; who speak truth from the heart and have not practiced deceit; who have not wronged another in any way, nor listened to slander against a neighbor.” (Ps 15:2–3)

—FROM THE PROLOGUE

The Benedictine Rule is as much a text for the spiritual beginner as it is for the spiritually mature. Some have described it as a guidepost. I like to think of it as a railing I can grab onto to steady myself when I encounter a dark, uncertain path. My own journey toward The Rule was hardly a direct route. A friend who is a Presbyterian minister recommended the text to me at a time when I had just moved back to the US from Europe and was embarking on a new phase of my writing career. He thought it might satisfy some of the spiritual unrest I was experiencing over whether I was doing enough with my life.

I thought it contained some lovely and thought-provoking passages. Listen with the ear of the heart … Day by day, remind yourself you are going to die. Hour by hour, keep careful watch over all you do … Your way of acting must be different from the world’s way. There was also enough in the text that was strange and puzzling to prompt me to set it aside for nearly a decade. It wasn’t until I saw The Rule lived in the daily context of a contemporary Benedictine monastery that I realized: here was the path I had been seeking.

Atchison, Kansas, is a city I had never thought about, much less visited, before I received an invitation to give a talk on Touching the Sacred through Poetry at the retreat center of Mount St. Scholastica, one of Atchison’s two Benedictine monasteries. The offer came at a pivotal time for me, both professionally and personally. I had been married only two years. While my marriage was a blessing, I struggled as a second wife to forge a relationship with my two adult stepdaughters.

My first book, Twenty Poems to Nourish the Soul, had just come out, and that was another gift. But it, too, came with stresses. I began receiving requests from across the country to lead poetry workshops and retreats on weekends, all the while working my day job at the time as a contributing correspondent for PBS-TV and Chicago Public Radio. I arrived at Mount St. Scholastica on a Saturday night exhausted—physically, mentally, and emotionally. In fact, I felt like a fraud. I wondered how I was going to stand in front of a retreat group the next morning and talk about nourishing the soul when I hadn’t fed my own soul a decent meal in weeks.

The morning I was to give my talk, I sat alone in the monastery’s oak-lined chapel. Sunlight streamed in through the chapel’s distinctive blue stained glass windows. Silence saturated the room. I looked up at the window in front of me. There was St. Benedict with outstretched arms. Surrounding him were some words in Latin: omni tempore silentio debent studere. I reached back to the Latin I had studied in college and did a rough translation: at all times, cultivate silence.

Suddenly, the paradox I had been living was staring me the face. I had been running around the country talking and talking, trying to help other people live a more contemplative life, when my own life was missing moments of silence and solitude in which I could simply listen and be.

The Mount sisters seemed keepers of a kind of secret. They balanced work with leisure, laughter with silence, work with prayer. I discovered that everything they do—from the way they eat to how they wash dishes, speak to one another, care for their sick, pray in chapel, and go about their daily work—comes from St. Benedict’s Rule. Though I didn’t know it then, the line that had mesmerized me that morning in the chapel—omni tempore silentio debent studere—comes from The Rule. What these sisters had, I wanted. I arrived at Mount St. Scholastica a poetry expert of sorts. I left a student of The Rule.

“There are days that define your story beyond your life,” the female linguist in The Arrival says at the beginning of the film. I felt that all of my past somehow had led me to this monastery on a hill and that the Benedictine Rule was reaching out to me from the ages.

Over the course of the next three years, I returned repeatedly to Mount St. Scholatica, mining The Rule for ways I could apply monastic values and practices to my daily life as a wife, stepmother, writer, and journalist. Benedict asks a pointed question in the book’s prologue: Is there anyone here who yearns for life and desires to see good days? I wanted to shout, “Yes. Me. Here. Now!”

What, dear brothers and sisters, is more delightful than this voice of the Holy One calling to us. See how God’s love shows us the way to life.

—FROM THE PROLOGUE

To delve deeply into The Rule is to discover just how astutely Benedict was writing in the 6th century. Recent discoveries about how the brain works buttress ideas he espoused before neuroscience was even a word. Paul Zak is an economist and brain researcher who has studied the effect on the human psyche of a powerful hormone called oxytocin. This is the chemical released in lovemaking, in women who have just given birth, as well as in people who have just acted in some way that benefits others. Zak calls oxytocin “the morale molecule.”

Using a variety of research experiments, Zak found that those who give usually end up receiving in return. One person’s generosity can even increase the oxytocin levels in another. In other words, human beings appear hardwired for community. We prosper most when we extend trust and receive it in return. The economic models we learn in MBA programs would have us believe the opposite—that self-interest is the fundamental human motivator. Zak, by contrast, found that trusting and exhibiting generous behavior leads to reciprocal generosity and trust.

“The most important factor in determining whether or not a society does well or is impoverished,” Zak concluded, “is not natural resources, education, quality health care, or even the work ethic of its people. What matters most in determining outcomes is actually trustworthiness—a moral consideration.”

This sounds a good deal like the community Benedict sought to create, and the one he entrusts us to build today. He foresaw the dangers of radical self-interest of the kind that led to the economic meltdown of 2008 and to the Great Depression (as well as other economic crises before and since then), to practices like slavery and apartheid, and to so many of the world’s wars. No one is to pursue what he judges better for himself to the detriment of others. This Benedict counseled nearly two millennia before oxytocin was even discovered.

The Rule also has a message for those of us on call twenty-four seven, swirling in a maelstrom of email, texting, Twitter, and Snapchat. It beckons as a plea for balance. Benedict carved the monastic day into distinct periods for work, prayer, reading, leisure, and rest. He believed there is a time to work, and a time to stop work. As someone who has long suffered from a dual diagnosis of workaholic and overachieverism, The Rule showed me that it is possible to pause, to care for myself, and still be productive. With its focus on balance, The Rule helps orient my attention toward the sacred in the ordinary. It propels me to live every day.

In many ways, Benedict and his predecessors—the early monastics of the Egyptian desert—were among history’s first psychologists. They understood that in order to live in community—or even as hermits—they would have to confront the emotional demons that haunt us all. They discovered ways to leaven our natural tendencies toward anger, self-absorption, greed, depression, unhealthy appetites, and obsessions. They did this not by repressing those tendencies, but by recognizing we are not our thoughts and we are not our feelings. We can redirect our thoughts and feelings into constructive actions. Doing this allows us to confront life’s inevitable turbulence with equanimity. The emotional tools that The Rule lays out have been more valuable to me than any self-help book or therapy session.

The reflections in the pages that follow are my attempts to draw out the major themes of The Rule in practical takeaways that can lead to personal transformation. For many centuries, men and women who entered monasteries were expected to memorize The Rule in the same way they committed to memory the Psalms or traditional prayers. But as the Benedictine writer Mary Margaret Funk points out, The Rule is not something to be absorbed intellectually. It has to be lived. It has to take up residence in our inner life.

“Benedict’s great insight,” she writes in her memoir Out of the Depths, “was that the work of the monastery was not simply about men and women living apart from society in a community. The true work lay in how one developed the interior life.”

The happy news is that this also applies to people who don’t live in monasteries—people like you and me who are trying to nurture a family, succeed in a rapidly changing workplace, and grow old with a sense of purpose. The true monastic enclosure is the human heart.

While there is still time, while we are in this body and have time to accomplish all these things, let us run and do now what will profit us forever.

—FROM THE PROLOGUE

Happily too, St. Benedict promises to demand of us nothing harsh, nothing burdensome. He reminds us we are always only beginners on the path to a deeper interior life. The spiritual journey is not a flight on a supersonic jet, but a slow steady trek, like hiking the Appalachian Trail or walking El Camino de Santiago de Compostela. “The spiritual life is this,” a monastic elder from the Egyptian desert once said, “I rise and I fall. I rise and I fall.”

I used to think of monastic life as a hopeless throwback to the past, a case of let the last monk or sister standing turn out the lights. Now I look upon it as a window to the future we desperately need in our society: one that stresses community over competition, consensus over conflict, simplicity over self-gain, and silence over the constant chatter and distractions of our lives. And so we begin.

Is there anyone here who yearns for life and desires to see good days?

2
LISTEN WITH THE EAR OF THE HEART
On Paying Attention

Listen carefully my daughter, my son to my instructions and attend to them with the ear of your heart. This is advice from one who loves you; welcome it and faithfully put it into practice.

—FROM THE PROLOGUE

A few years ago, I had the opportunity to report on a talk that Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor gave to University of Illinois law students. It was not long after the sudden death of her colleague on the court, Justice Antonin Scalia. Scalia often sparred with Sotomayor and the other judges of the court’s so-called “progressive” wing. In one of his more colorful opinions, he accused opposing justices of engaging in the “jiggery-pokery” of devious behavior. He derided another majority opinion, of which Sotomayor was a part, as the equivalent of legal “applesauce.”

For her part, Sotomayor described Scalia as “the brother I loved, and sometimes wanted to kill.” How then, asked one of the law students, did the justices engage in these intense disagreements and still manage to collaborate? Sotomayor gave a very Benedictine answer. They listen to one another.

“You may not like what they’re proposing, but that doesn’t mean they’re doing it from an evil motive,” she said of her fellow jurists. Justices can passionately disagree, she said, “and still see the goodness in one another.” She offered a recommendation for dealing with professional—and personal—divisions. Less talking, more listening.

I’ve often marveled, that the first word of The Rule of St. Benedict isn’t pray, worship, or even love. It’s listen. This small, unobtrusive word speaks in a whisper. To anyone who studies Benedictine spirituality, the phrase listen … with the ear of the heart becomes so familiar we can easily lose sight of how revolutionary it is. Listening in the Benedictine sense is not a passive mission. Benedict tells us we must attend to listening. In some translations of The Rule, we are to actively incline ourselves toward it, and nurture it in our everyday activities. Listening is an act of will.

When I look at the failures and disappointments in my own life, I can often trace them to an operator error in listening—usually my own. Even though I earn my living as a journalist—which is to say I listen to other people’s stories for a living—in my private life I’m often like the doctor who is her own worst patient. I’m great at hearing my heart’s desire, but not so adept at hearing the messages I need to receive from others.

Perhaps it comes from being the youngest in my family and having had to fight to be heard. I am also a person of strong opinions. That too can be a prescription for tone-deafness. Once, a colleague whom I respect called me on a Saturday morning to tell me he thought I can come across too forcefully at staff meetings. My initial reaction: ridiculous! My second reaction was anger that someone I considered a friend would engage in what I felt was a personal attack.

Then I started listening with the ear of my heart. I mentally replayed the tapes of some recent meetings where I had voiced my opinion. I heard my own voice. I could see that what I might consider passionately advocating for a position, others might find argumentative and condescending.

A friend who is a counselor once suggested that when my husband and I disagree on something, instead of repeatedly hammering at our individual opinions, we might stop and each repeat to the other what he or she has said, ending with the question, “Am I understanding you correctly?” It’s amazing how many times I have to repeat what my husband has said before I get it right, and he must do the same. We listen through the echo chamber of our own perceptions. The Benedictine Rule calls us to not only listen, but to actually hear.

Obedience is a blessing to be shown by all, not only to the prioress or abbot, but also to one another, since we know that it is by way of this obedience that we go to God.

—FROM CHAPTER 71, “MUTUAL OBEDIENCE”

Listening cracks open the door to another Benedictine concept from which most of us would rather run,—that of obedience. My first reaction is to recoil from the word. It conjures memories of being sent to my room or the principal’s office for not doing what I was told. Obedience comes from the Latin, oboedire, to give ear, to harken, to listen. The Benedictine writer Esther de Waal says that obedience moves us from our “contemporary obsession with the self,” and inclines us toward others. For those living in a monastery, obedience isn’t merely a rigor to endure. St. Benedict describes it as gift—a blessing to be shown by all. In doing so, he moves beyond the common understanding of the word as solely an authoritarian, top-down dynamic. He stresses instead mutual obedience, a horizontal relationship where careful listening and consideration is due to each member of the community from each member, as brothers and sisters. It is by this way of obedience, he says, that we go to God.

In our western civilization, this is a counter-cultural message. We admire antiheroes like Holden Caulfield in Catcher in the Rye, Randle McMurphy in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, or Don Draper in Mad Men—outsiders who lurk at the margins, test the system. We honor trailblazers like Hildegard of Bingen, Eleanor Roosevelt, Dorothy Day, and others who refused the boundaries of traditional roles. But in their own way, those women were listeners too—hearers of a different song.

Most people in religious life have a story or two about the test of obedience. Usually it involves a seemingly insensitive superior who requires them to detour from a plan they had laid out for themselves. In her memoir Scarred by Struggle, Transformed by Hope, the Benedictine sister and spiritual teacher Joan Chittister tells of being accepted to a Masters in Fine Arts creative writing program at Iowa State University. At the time, she was teaching high school English, but dreamed of writing the kind of literature she was presenting in class. The Iowa State program threw her a lifeline. She recalls how after she received her acceptance letter, “Every day was suddenly easier than it had ever been before. Every moment was light … I could afford to treat the daily nature of grades and papers and class periods lovingly. There was suddenly no burden to it at all. Just finality. Just conclusion. Just gratitude.”

That would all end in a single hurried conversation. In a complete reversal, her prioress at the time—the same one who encouraged her to apply to the MFA program—told her the dream of studying creative writing would have to wait. She was needed to work as a third cook (yes, third cook!) at a summer camp run by her monastery. Sister Joan needed the kitchen job, her superior said, to deepen her humility.

“And so began one of the greatest struggles in my life,” Sister Joan writes. “I now wonder how I could have become the person I was meant to be if I had ever become the writer I thought Iowa State would make me.”

As is often the case, we can’t see beyond immediate disappointment. In the end, what seemed an insurmountable setback only deepened Sister Joan’s conviction that she was meant to write. She overcame the confines of her superior’s order by writing in her spare time with an even greater fervor. Having published dozens of books that have sold more than a million copies, she says she now looks back at that dark disappointment as the moment she realized no obstacle could deter her from her twin vocations, as a Benedictine and a writer.

Sister Irene Nowell of Mount St. Scholastica Monastery in Kansas is one of the world’s foremost Scripture scholars. But that is not the path she envisioned for herself. She arrived at her monastery an accomplished cellist. She expected to continue her musical studies in graduate school. Instead, her prioress informed her she would have to study German. “I said, ‘Mother, I don’t want a degree in German,’” Sister Irene recalls.

“She said, ‘That’s not the right answer.’ So I went off to get a degree in German.”

Many years later, Sister Irene asked to study Scripture at St. John’s University in Minnesota. “I got hooked on Scripture,” she says. “And do you know what they said? They told me the German degree was the best preparation I could have had because at that point so much of the research on Scripture had been written in German.”

Scripture—and music—became the defining themes of her life. She has written a translation of the Psalms for her community’s Liturgy of the Hours and was one of the scholars who worked on the English translation of the revised Catholic Bible as well as the St. John’s Bible, the first illuminated Bible in five hundred years, commissioned by St. John’s Abbey in Minnesota.

“So what the prioress did for me in forcing me to study German was really prophetic,” Sister Irene now says.

The stories of these two Benedictine women remind me that I have to listen not only to my inner voice, but to outside—and sometimes unwelcome—voices as well, like that of my colleague who warned that my strong opinions can sometimes be grating. Disappointment is often a useful teacher. Can I have the courage to listen to it, to discern where it might be leading me?

Let us open our eyes to the light that comes from God and our ears to the voice from the heavens that everyday calls out this charge: If you hear God’s voice today, harden not your hearts (Ps 95:8). And again, You that have ears to hear, listen to what the Spirit says. (Rv 2:7).

—FROM THE PROLOGUE

In listening with the ear of the heart, I’ve often discovered wisdom comes from what at first might seem an unlikely source. My father finished high school by attending night classes while working during the day. He earned his living as a truck driver. I, with my advanced degrees, often dismissed what he had to say. I know now that while my book learning might have given me knowledge, it didn’t necessarily make me wise. My father had a staple of sayings he was fond of repeating. One of them was, “When you’re hungry you eat, when you’re tired, you sleep.” That one used to draw some of the loudest guffaws. I guess I thought it was a stupidly self-evident statement. But there have been periods in my writing career when I have been so self-driven, I literally forgot to eat. I neglected to get enough sleep. At one point, when I was making an ample salary at one of the largest newspapers in the country, I landed in the hospital suffering from exhaustion and malnutrition—both self-inflicted wounds—and had to spend four months recuperating.

Suddenly my father’s little saying didn’t seem so stupid. It contained wisdom worthy of the Book of Proverbs. It’s something I still need to remind myself of, daily.

I experienced a similar lesson in listening when my husband and I led a retreat one Lent in rural Semmes, Alabama. Semmes is such a small community that when I asked for directions from the pastor of the church we would be visiting, he said, “Just roll into town on the main road, pass a cotton field and the Dollar General, and you can’t miss the church.”

On the first night of the retreat, I arrived early at the parish hall to collate the handouts, set up the CD player, and test the projector for the opening PowerPoint presentation. I became vaguely aware of an older woman flittering around the hall, sometimes talking to herself. I remember thinking, “I’d like to talk to this woman, just not now. I’m busy.”

I glanced over at the table I had been planning to use as a kind of altar. Someone had covered the table with a white linen cloth and placed an elaborate bronze crucifix in the center, along with a vase of fresh flowers.

“How do you like the way I fixed up the altar?” the woman said. “That crucifix there, that’s been in my family for generations.”

The woman I had been trying to avoid had brought the altar cloth, the flowers, and the crucifix. She not only decorated the altar, she had also brewed the coffee and baked a cake—the only cake anyone had brought to share.

I learned her name was Eva. On the second night of the retreat, Eva brought some poems she had written. One was a loving chronicle of the characters she meets on her weekly pilgrimages to the Dollar General. My husband and I thought the poem was so moving, we asked Eva to read it to the retreat group. It was early spring, and Eva talked about being an avid gardener. She said she wakes at dawn to look for new shoots beginning to break through the soil. They remind her that every day nature is renewing itself, and so are we. I soon figured out that any wisdom anyone was going to take away from the retreat wasn’t going to come from my husband or me, but from Eva.

We returned home from Alabama a few days before Easter. Two cards were waiting in the mailbox. One was an Easter card from my sister. The other was from Eva.

“Hope you all have a blessed Easter,” Eva wrote. “I think of you two often. Writers are like gardeners. They both grow things. When I lose someone close to me now, I don’t send flowers anymore. I write a poem for the family and frame it. Poems last longer.”

Who are the wise ones in our lives—like my father, like Eva? Whose words to us have been difficult to hear? Are we missing a message within the message? Are we listening with the ear of the heart?

For reflection:

In his wonderful poem “I’m Going To Start Living Like A Mystic,” the poet Edward Hirsch talks about walking silently, listening and observing attentively. This week, how can I consciously practice less talking, more listening?

Justice Sotomayor says listening is the key to preserving relationships. How harmonious are my relationships with the people with whom I live and work? What are some of the “operator errors” in listening that have occurred between us? How can I make them right?

Were there times in my life when listening deeply to a disappointment or setback, like the ones Sisters Joan and Irene suffered, helped me strike out in a new direction, or reignited a passion?

What is disappointment trying to teach me today?

Who are the unexpected prophets hidden in plain sight of my life? Am I paying attention to what they have to say, even if it is something I might not want to hear?

3
RUN WITH THE LIGHT
On Waking Up

Let us get up then, at long last, for the Scriptures rouse us when they say: “It is high time to arise from sleep.” (Rom 13:11)

—FROM THE PROLOGUE

There is a wonderful scene in the novel Zorba the Greek in which Zorba tells the young foreman he’s befriended about meeting a ninety-year-old man who planted an almond tree.

“What, Grandfather, planting an almond tree!” Zorba exclaims, guessing the old man won’t live long enough to see the tree bear fruit.

“My son, I carry on as if I should never die,” the old man says.

Zorba replies, “And I carry on as if I was going to die any minute.”

“Which of us was right, boss?” Zorba asks the young foreman.

I tend to agree with Zorba. I like to think I try to live my life fully, as if I might die any minute. In college, I had a writing professor named James C. G. Conniff who routinely railed about students he felt were sleepwalking through life. The Jesuit writer Anthony de Mello writes, “Most people, even though they don’t know it, are asleep. They’re born asleep, they live asleep, they marry in their sleep, they breed children in their sleep, they die in their sleep, without every waking up. They never understand the loveliness and the beauty of this thing we call human existence.” Even a long life is no guarantee that any of us will ever awaken from our emotional stupor.

That same sense of urgency to “wake up!” permeates the Benedictine Rule. It is especially pronounced in the early chapters. We need to get serious, St. Benedict seems to be saying, about living what the poet Mary Oliver calls our “one wild and precious life.” Action verbs prevail here.

Let us open our eyes to the light that comes from God …

The Lord waits for us daily to translate into action his holy teachings …

Let us set out on this way with the Gospel for our guide …

We will never arrive unless we run there by doing good deeds …

Are you hastening toward your heavenly home? …

And one of my favorite lines in all of The Rule:

Run while you have the light of life, that the darkness of death may not overtake you.

Yearn. Love. Pray. Renounce. Respect. Live. All words that pop up early on in The Rule.

Most mornings, I rise around 4 A.M. to the sound of a thwack against our front door. It is the signature of Lauren or Junie, one of our two paper carriers, carrying out a line of work that one day soon will likely go the way of the milkman, the TV repairman, and the doctor who made house calls. Sometimes I am swift enough and awake enough to open the door and give one or the other a greeting. That never fails to startle them, accustomed as they are to seeing only dark and silent houses at that hour of the morning. I used to just scoop up the New York Times and dash back inside. But lately I’ve taken to lingering outside for a few minutes. I survey our front yard, the other houses on the block, and the sky at that moment when the birds begin their morning calls. The moon is still stationed overhead, and daylight is starting to creep onto the horizon.

I witness some strange and wonderful sights. Once it was a skunk exiting from between two bushes. It must have been a polite skunk, as I don’t recall it leaving behind its traditional calling card. Often there are rabbits romping across the grass. They become quite still at my arrival, as if they are imitating statues. Other days, a snake or a slug on the front step. One morning I will never forget, I happened to look up just as a shooting star streaked across the sky. I felt so lucky to have been watching at that precise moment. I should say here that our house isn’t in the middle of some prairie. It sits in the heart of a university town, so a shooting star or undomesticated animal isn’t something you are likely to see. Unless, of course, you’re paying attention.

On my first visit to the Abbey of Gethsemani in Kentucky, I wanted to savor the entire experience. I was determined to wake up in time for the 3:15 A.M. Vigils, the first prayers of the day. My room wasn’t in the regular retreatant’s quarters attached to the abbey, but rather on top of a hill overlooking the monastery in what the monks call the Family Guest House. I had to walk about five minutes down the hill to get to the abbey church. One morning I stepped outside my room before dawn and saw an amazing sight. The entire southern edge of the sky was awash in stars. I felt as if I could step inside this doorway of starlight. One of the monks, Brother Paul Quenon, told me later I had been looking into the Milky Way. He pointed to a solitary, bright star suspended in an opposite direction—the planet Venus. Suddenly the reason for waking up that early acquired a whole new dimension. The candlelit prayers in the abbey chapel and the chanting of the Psalms provide a wonderful, soulful entry to the day. So do the magical sights you can behold at that time of morning when much of the world is still asleep.

The 3rd- and 4th-century monks who lived in the desert considered the silence of the night a valuable teacher. Night reminds us that time is passing. Our lives, like days, are finite. Antony, one of the most revered of the desert monks, advised, “Each day when we arise, let’s assume we won’t live until nightfall. And at night, when going to sleep, let’s assume we won’t awaken.” His wasn’t a morbid fascination with death, but a reality check. We have a limited amount of days in which to live, so we might as well wake up and act now. There is important work to do.

If you desire true and eternal life, “keep your tongue free from vicious talk, your lips free from all deceit; turn away from evil and let peace be your quest and aim.” (Ps 34: 14–15).

—FROM THE PROLOGUE

For Benedict, awakening our senses to our physical surroundings is the natural prelude to awakening the heart. In high school, I had a wonderful teacher for freshman English named Margaret Henley. Miss Henley was something of an aspiring poet, as well as the faculty advisor for the school literary magazine and thus a group of us girls who fancied ourselves emerging writers. All writers, she would say, begin as observers. She challenged us one day to recall the eye color of the bus driver who took us to school that morning. I should have known this. I knew the driver’s name. He was a regular along my route. He had even taped a piece of cardboard onto the corner of the bus’s front window that said, scrawled in sparkle ink, “Wishing You A Good Day, Your Driver Sam.” But the color of Sam’s eyes? I could only guess. Blue?

Ever since that day in class, I’ve tried to not only notice, but also truly observe the people I pass in the street, the grocery store, or sit next to on the bus—not to mention the people I interview as a journalist. Still, I fall down on the job. As a young reporter for the Dallas Times Herald, I was sent to write about a man who, over the years, had portrayed Santa for something like ten thousand children. He was a jovial fellow, just about the right size for Santa, with a seemingly inexhaustible well of patience. He appeared to experience deep joy in being around children. He spoke lovingly of his own grown children.

At about eight o’clock that Christmas Eve, the phone rang at my home. It was Joe, the man who played Santa. He was in tears. He told me how much he appreciated the article I had written about him. He thanked me for being so kind to him. Because of my kindness, he wanted me to know it was all a faade. He in fact hated Christmas. His wife had divorced him. His children didn’t talk to him. Every Christmas, he found himself alone. In fact, all the while he was volunteering at hospitals, stores, and children’s parties as Santa, he had been living out of his car because he couldn’t afford an apartment. He said it was all he could do to not think about killing himself as he took off his red Santa suit for the last time of the season.

Why hadn’t I seen any of this coming? How could I, a trained observer, have missed picking up on even an inkling of this man’s pain? I called my parents and told them I’d be late coming over to their home for Christmas Eve dinner. With a friend, I drove over to the part of town where Joe was sitting in his broken down car on that cold December night. We tried to convince him to come back with us to my parent’s house for a meal. He didn’t want to come, but thanked us for spending time with him. You could say my best gift that Christmas Eve was that I woke up.

What is not possible to us by nature, let us ask the Holy One to supply with the help of grace.

—FROM THE PROLOGUE

In his autobiography, Chronicles, singer-songwriter Bob Dylan says one of the greatest influences on his life was his maternal grandmother. She once told him something he never forgot: “Everyone you’ll ever meet is fighting a hard battle.” Joe is a prime example. To truly see Joe, I first had to break out of the tomb of my own self-absorption. I had to climb out from my own battleground so I could see someone else’s “hard battle.”

Joe’s story has a somewhat happy ending. About a year later, I ran into him. He was dressed in a business suit and said that with the help of a social service agency, he was able to scrape together enough money to begin making belts and other leather goods for sale. The business wasn’t exactly booming, but he had customers among the people he met over the many years he had played Santa. St. Benedict asks us to awaken to the whisper of the sacred in our daily lives. And then he asks more. He asks that we wake up to the people around us—to truly see them. In a beautiful scene in the musical version of The Bridges of Madison County, the main character at one point asks her lover to look deeply at her hands, her mouth, her shoulders. She says, “talk to me, like there’s something to say.” One of the greatest gifts we can give to others is to let them know they are seen and heard.

The Benedictine Abbot Jerome Kodell writes about partaking of “the sacrament of the present moment.” That is what I felt I was doing that Christmas Eve with Joe. It is an attitude of awareness I try to cultivate toward the people I meet every day who are fighting their hard battles. It is a way to run with the light, and live.

For Reflection:

I will create a timeline of my life, noting significant events such as educational and professional achievements, births and deaths of loved ones, marriages, even traumas. Is there a pattern that emerges? Were there times when I felt prompted to “wake up?”

Where does my life seem to be heading?

Is my life best described by action verbs, or is it characterized by passive tense as I allow events to act on me, shaping my attitudes and responses? How can I become a more active player my life?

Do I live as if I would never die, like the old almond tree planter, or do I live like Zorba—as if I could die any minute? Is there wisdom in both views?

In what ways am I sleepwalking through life right now? How can I wake up?

4
IS THERE LIFE BEFORE DEATH?
On Living Fully

Day by day remind yourself that you are going to die.

—FROM CHAPTER 4, “THE TOOLS FOR GOOD WORKS”

I have always had a terrible fear of death. It often grips me in the middle of the night. At those times, I wake seized with the anxiety that I will one day no longer occupy the chair at my work desk, my place at the kitchen table, or my side of the bed.

This fear began at an early age. It may have something to do with having parents who were older when I was born. They looked like my friends’ grandparents. Grandparents had the unfortunate habit of dying. I feared my parents would die and I’d be left alone.

I was also haunted early on by a sense of life’s brevity. One New Year’s Eve as I watched Guy Lombardo’s orchestra on TV with my parents, a band member sang, “Enjoy Yourself (It’s Later Than You Think).” When he got to the line about how the years go by “as quickly as a wink!” I began to weep uncontrollably. I was four years old at the time.

No wonder, then, that when I first began reading The Rule, few passages leaped out at me more than Day by day, remind yourself you are going to die. As an adolescent, I liked characters in literature who refused to sleepwalk through life: Larry Darrell, the spiritual seeker in Somerset Maugham’s The Razor’s Edge; Eugene Gant, who yearns to leave the emotional confines of his small town and fractured family in Look Homeward, Angel; and of course, the insouciant Zorba the Greek. In a notebook where I kept all my favorite quotations, I dutifully copied Zorba’s observation that, “All those who actually live the mysteries of life haven’t the time to write, and all those who have the time, don’t live them. Do you see?” Yes, I saw. I vowed to both live the mysteries and write.

For a time, as I focused on my writing career, I was able to put aside my fear of death, like a book I’d read and put back on its shelf. Then something happened. My mother died suddenly of a stroke. Death, my old adversary, reannounced itself as the fundamental struggle of my life. It was an adversary my life-loving mother could not overcome, and one I knew no measure of my own will could vanquish either.

What haunted me most about my mother’s death was its suddenness. How could a person who was talking, joking, and enjoying a meal of eggplant parmesan one Sunday no longer exist the next? Walking into my parents’ living room for the first time after my mother’s death, I was overwhelmed by the stillness. The house reeked of silence.

I wondered if her death—or any death—might be easier to cope with if there had been some warning that it was imminent. Or is it better we don’t know it’s the last year, the last week, the last day, and we simply live our lives and love who we love right up to the end?

Hour by hour keep careful watch over all you do, aware that God’s gaze is upon you wherever you may be.

—FROM CHAPTER 4, “THE TOOLS FOR GOOD WORKS”

Around the time my mother died, I had another extraordinary experience. I was walking in downtown Chicago when I noticed a police cordon in front of an office tower. I asked a bystander what had happened, and he told me a window had fallen out of the twenty-first floor of the building. It struck a woman who had been walking with her daughter, killing the young mother instantly—as unpredictable a death as you can imagine. Once again, death seemed like some maniacal sharp shooter, randomly picking its targets. I could not stop thinking about that woman. One minute she was walking along Wabash Avenue holding her little girl’s hand, and the next barreling through to the afterlife. It reminded me of a line in “For the Anniversary of My Death” a poem by W.S. Merwin. “Every year without knowing it, we pass the date of our death.”

I thought about the possibility of my own death. How I hoped it would not just show up at my door, a discourteous guest, but drop a note in the mail instead, months or weeks before, as polite company would do. I remembered a character Ben Gazzara played in an old TV drama called Run for Your Life, a lawyer who is told he has six months to live. He spends that time driving across the country, helping complete strangers wherever he stops to find their purpose in life. Maybe I could be like that. I hoped I would have time to tear up my journals, press the clothes in the laundry basket, finish the crossword puzzles on my nightstand, toss out my torn underpants, and apologize for decades of bad behavior before removing the robe of life.

A few years after my mother’s death, when I began spending extended periods at Mount St. Scholastica Monastery, one of the first friends I made was then eighty-nine-year-old Sister Lillian Harrington. I got to know Sister Lillian very well, and felt comfortable enough with her to share my intense fear of dying. One day, I asked her if she ever thought about the moment of death. She drilled her steely blue eyes into mine and told me something I’ve never forgotten. “I don’t think about dying,” she said, “I think about living.”

Living mindfully, looking beyond the obvious—these were things Sister Lillian did, along with drinking strawberry daiquiris and enjoying birthday cake just a few days before she died at the age of ninety-six.

Witnessing the dying, death, and burial of a sister at the Mount was another profound experience. The sisters confront death not begrudgingly, but rather lovingly, tenderly. Unless a sister dies suddenly, or away from the monastery, no one dies alone. The sisters keep a twenty-four hour vigil at the bedside of the dying. They call it “sitting with” the person. As a woman without children of my own and a husband who is nine years older, I sometimes wonder who will be sitting with me.

When the casket returns from the funeral home bearing a sister’s body, every member of the community lines up to meet it, as a bell tolls in the monastery tower. The night before the burial is for storytelling—a time for the community to remember the sister they lost—her gifts, shortcomings, eccentricities, and all.

With one sister carrying high a crucifix, community members march behind the casket the next morning to the cemetery. They stride with purpose and abandon to the gravesite. The first time I witnessed this, I remember thinking, these must be the only truly free people in America.

I don’t think that their fearlessness in the face of death comes solely from their belief in eternal life. As Sister Lillian once said to me, “We don’t know what happens to us after death, we just believe.” I think their equanimity comes from the confidence that each one of them has lived a meaningful life. In the same chapter of The Rule in which Benedict asks us to daily remind ourselves we are going to die, he also gives us a blueprint for how to live:

Pray for your enemies out of love for Christ. If you have a dispute with someone, make peace before the sun goes down. And finally, never lose hope in God’s mercy.

—FROM CHAPTER 4, “THE TOOLS FOR GOOD WORKS”

These are things we probably should have been taught in kindergarten.

I once interviewed a member of the Freedom from Religion Foundation, an association of nonbelievers. She happened to be a cancer survivor. She said death is what gives meaning to life. Believing that nothing awaits us beyond this life spurs us to make the most of this life. I think she got it wrong. I believe it is life that gives meaning to death. As Joan Chittister writes, “The fundamental question for a Christian isn’t whether there’s life after death, but whether there’s life before death.”

These days, as I hurtle toward middle age, I’m inspired by the artist Candy Chang. In cities across America, Chang creates interactive art installations that consist of a chalkboard, often placed on the side of a building next to a bucket of colored chalk. Stenciled on the chalkboard is the sentence, “Before I die I want to …” Chang leaves space for people passing by to fill in their response. These are some of the responses people have written:

Before I die I want to:

“Straddle the international dateline.”

“Sing in front of millions.”

“Plant a tree.”

And one wish that catches in my throat every time I read it:

“Before I die, I want to hold him in my arms one more time.”

The philosopher Steve Cave gave a talk a few years ago on National Public Radio’s Ted Radio Hour. His topic was, “Why Are Human Beings Afraid To Die?” Cave spoke of his own fear of death from an early age. It sounded very similar to mine. He said he eventually discovered a new way of thinking about death that helped him with his fear.

“I find it helps to see life as being like a book,” Cave said. “A book is bound by its covers … so our lives are bounded by birth and death.” He continued by saying that the characters in a book know no horizons. They are not afraid of reaching the last chapter, because they only know the moments that make up their story. We humans who are characters in life “need not worry how long our story is, if it’s a comic strip or an epic,” Cave said. “The only thing that matters is that it’s a good story.”

The only thing that matters is that it’s a good story. That is why we keep death daily before our eyes.

There is a beautiful dedication that comes at the beginning of John Steinbeck’s novel East of Eden. Steinbeck wrote it for his editor. He likens his book to an exquisitely carved box. What he says about his box, I’d like to say about my life at the end:

“Here is your box. Nearly everything I have is in it … Pain and excitement are in it, and feeling good or bad, and evil thoughts and good thoughts … the pleasure of design and some despair … and the indescribable joy of creation. And on top of these are all the gratitude and love I have for you. And still the box is not full.”

This is what the living do. We put everything we have into our life. And on top of it all the gratitude and love we have for one another. May our boxes never empty.

For Reflection:

How do I keep death daily before my eyes?

How would I finish this sentence: Before I die, I want to …?

How do those who have passed on remain present to me?

I will write a few paragraphs or draw a portrait of someone who modeled for me how to live. I will do the same for someone who modeled how to die.

I will create a mental picture of myself in my coffin, and the people at my funeral. I imagine the eulogy I would like someone to be able to deliver about me.

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