Archive, Readings
Desert Fathers 51
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First of all, whatever good work you undertake, ask [God] by insistent prayer to bring it to perfection, that he, already pleased to count us as sons, will not have, at some point, to be grieved by our evil actions. It is our task at all times to obey him, making use of the good things he has placed in us. If we live like this, not only will he not, like some angry father, disinherit his sons; neither will he, like a fearful lord provoked to anger by our evils, give us up to everlasting punishment because we did not wish to follow him to glory. Let us rise up, then, without wasting time, even as Scripture rouses us saying: ‘It is time for us to arise from sleep.’ With our eyes opened to the deifying light and our ears thunderstruck, let us hear how God’s voice is admonishing us with a shout, saying: ‘If today you would hear his voice, harden not your hearts!’.
Benedict left Rome in search of solitude, but was not alone when he set out. With him went his nurse. It is a rather nice aspect of his story. The idealist who forfeited his patrimony yet brought his nanny. She ‘loved him very much’; no doubt, he cared for her. Benedict did not shake off all human ties abruptly. He eased this dear person into the new reality his radical choice would create for her.
The two of them stayed together for a while; but this was provisional. Benedict left her where she would not be bereft, then proceeded into ‘the wilderness’: Subiaco in the Roman campagna. The site is marked by majestic austerity. The river running through it murmurs now as it did in his day. The crags overhanging Subiaco’s steep, wooded, dark slopes provide a sheltering embrace. At the same time they carry just a hint of menace, recalling the metaphorical precipices from which Benedict chose to turn away in Rome. He settled in a low, narrow cave to keep quiet and pray. He left no diary, but we can responsibly infer something of his experience there from the teachings he later dispensed.
The passage above, from the prologue to the Rule, speaks of reorientation. A lost son decides to go home, to learn to see and hear anew. The reference to deifying light, deificum lumen, is important. To grasp what it means, let us consider a parallel construction. The Latin for ‘bread’ is ‘panis’. From it, a verb is derived, ‘panificere’: which means ‘to make bread’. A ‘panificus’ is a baker. Italians still go twice daily to get fresh loaves from the local panificio, it being unthinkable to eat old bread (from midday) at supper. Even as ‘panificere’ denotes production, the bringing about of the object named before the verbal ‘-ficere’, to do with making, ‘deificere’ means to make someone a god, or, in the language of theology, to ‘divinise’ him. The monk is one who wishes to see restored in him the Godlikeness for which his nature is intended.
Having first asked us to keep our eyes open to deifying light, Benedict says something odd. He exhorts us to attend to God’s voice ‘attonitis auribus’, that is, with ears thunderstruck by the rumble of ‘tonitrus’. When the Fathers use uncommon expressions in this way, it is usually deliberate. They expect us, their devout readers, to pick up some reference or other to Sacred Scripture. So where in the Bible do we find a coincidence of deifying light (or ‘glory’), a divine voice, and apparent thunder? The match is the passage in St John’s Gospel which marks the end of Christ’s discourse before the sacred Passover at which, ‘having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them to the end’. Jesus said to the crowd:
Now my heart is troubled. And what shall I say? ‘Father, save me from this hour?’ No, for this purpose I have come to this hour. Father, glorify thy name!’ Then a voice came from heaven, ‘I have glorified it, and I will glorify it again.’ The crowd standing by heard it and said that it had thundered. Others said, ‘An angel has spoken to him’. Jesus answered, ‘This voice has come for your sake, not for mine. Now is the judgement of this world, now shall the ruler of this world be cast out; and I, when I am lifted up, shall draw all things to myself.’
This is the monastic project in a nutshell. A monk has known God’s way of ‘drawing all things to himself’ as a personal reality. Feeling 
the twitch upon the thread, he freely followed. His free initiative is crucial, for a man is no automaton. He is unprogrammable, possessed of that liberty to say ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ that is at once our crown of splendour and a potential path to soul-death. The novice who requests the monastic habit has glimpsed the light, heard the thunder, known the Lord’s call, then said, ‘Here I am!’ If he keeps that response alive, his whole life will come to signify the glory of which Scripture speaks. Rising from sleep to watch before God on behalf of half-dozing mankind tossing and turning in anguish, he casts off darkness and puts on the armour of light.
That light will, if he is faithful, increasingly not just surround him, but enter and suffuse him. Thus the Lord would refashion all of us gloriously. Not to make us other than we are! His will is to help us become what we are in truth, to abandon what is counterfeit and false, and so to stand before God and mankind integral, solid, radiant, and joyful — mature women and men recognisably formed in the light-bestowing image of God. This is what Benedict sought when he put on ‘the habit which belongs to a holy way of life’. His cave at Subiaco was the womb in which he was silently reborn to life in God.