In Praise of Benedict

 July 11, 1989

In Praise of Benedict

“Once there was a man who was revered for the holiness of his life. Benedict was his name, and he was also blessed with God’s grace.” Thus begins the Life and Miracles of St. Benedict, whose feast the Catholic Church celebrates tomorrow, written by Pope St. Gregory the Great, himself a Benedictine monk. Who indeed was Benedict, and how did he come to play such a vital role, not just in the history of the Church, but in the evolution of Western civilization?

Nothing we know of Benedict through his hagiographer Gregory prepares us for the disproportionate influence he has wielded on the course of religious and human events these past millennium and a half. He was born around 480 A.D., the scion of a noble Roman family. As a young student, he found life in the imperial capital so decadent and corrupt he decided to become a hermit and seek God. Subsequently, he established two monasteries for those who sought to follow his example. He died about 547 A.D. That is all.

But the age in which Benedict lived was one of conflict and violent change. The old Empire was dying. Barbarian armies under Attila, Alaric and Genseric had overrun the Italian peninsula, devastating everything in their path and all but extinguishing every vestige of Graeco-Roman culture. It was in such a setting that the way of life prescribed by Benedict for his monks started to assume crucial significance.

Strangely so, for all Benedict really wanted to do when he set down his Rule for monks was to provide them with a framework within which to pursue a regimen of ora et labora, work and prayer totally dedicated to God’s service, in an atmosphere of peace and quiet away from the hustle and bustle of secular living. But peace and quiet was precisely what the men and women of those troubled times most needed, and as all Europe plunged deeper into what we have come to know as the Dark Ages, it was the Benedict’s monasteries that they turned to for refuge and solace.

Order, strength, stability, security: in a world gone awry, these were the values these religious enclaves stood for, and their very construction made these values immediately apparent. Look at Monte Cassino, the second monastery Benedict founded on the summit of a mountain overlooking the road from Rome to Naples. The words massive, formidable, impregnable readily come to mind. Obviously built to last, it is now almost 1,500 years old!

This ancient edifice bears witness, not just to divine zeal and spiritual fortitude, but likewise to human  organization and achievement. For Benedict was both a man of God and a Roman – and, therefore, also a very practical man. God provides, but man lives by the sweat of his brow just the same.

Behind the high and thick walls of monasteries like Monte Cassino were not only seekers after perfection and holiness, but hardworking and highly skilled builders, craftsmen, artisans, cooks and farmers, not to mention scholars, musicians, and scientists, constituting a large family perfectly capable of looking after its own needs.

Not only did they preserve and copy the theological, philosophical, literary and scientific texts of classical antiquity. They also constructed edifices, cleared forests, built roads and bridges, cultivated fields, raised livestock, poultry and fish, spun yarn, fed and clothed the poor, healed the sick, welcomed pilgrims and strangers. All these, at a time when the rest of known humanity in the west merely struggled to stay alive.

The great libraries, the soaring cathedrals of England, the large farms of Germany, the great vineyards of France as well as the books, blocks of stone, and the crop strains, machines and implements used to organize them: they are the enduring legacy of that obscure genius who started out looking for God in wilderness and ended up saving the world of mankind.

The Lord has truly risen!

 May 25 1989

The Lord has truly risen!

The wonderful thing about the gospels is they do not demand that we take the Resurrection of Christ at face value. Their authors, Luke and John in particular, take great pains to show that for the disciples themselves, the first Easter was no fait accompli.

Indeed, so totally traumatic must have been the passion and crucifixion of the Master that at the outset, these lowly fishermen found it virtually impossible to believe that He would come back from the grave as promised. He had died. They were lost. That was all.

Alas. The women were no help. At crack of dawn after the Sabbath, Mary Magdalene, Mary, the mother of James and Salome, had gone to anoint the dead Jesus, found His tomb empty, and come back with some wild story about apparitions, but why trust them? They were probably still too distraught over the shocking events of the past few days.

Under the circumstances, the most plausible explanation was that robbers had broken into the tomb and taken Him away. Meanwhile, the priests at the temple were peddling quite another story. It was the disciples themselves who had stolen His body!

At that moment, the disciples could do no more than hide and huddle together, petrified by dark forebodings about what lay in store for them. For with the Master gone, who would save them from the Sanhedrin and an end as ignominious as His? How to mollify that unruly mob now loudly complaining they have been had by a false messiah and his minions? Spared either fate, where would they go and what were they to do with themselves next?

It is amidst such confusion and trepidation that the real story of Esther begins to unfold, a story of longing perfected by love, fear vanquished through hope, and doubt yielding to faith. In the end, as the gospels of John and Luke tell it, the Resurrection is all about human frailty overtaken and transfigured by divine grace.

A repentant sinner, two cowards, and an obdurate, ornery man: to these unlikely characters above all the rest Jesus revealed the real meaning of and import of His Resurrection.

In John we find Mary Magdalene remaining outside the tomb after the others have left, unabashedly weeping “Because they have taken my Lord and I don’t know where they have put him.” So distressed is she that when Jesus himself appears, she mistakes Him for the gardener and pleads, “Tell me where you have put him, and I will go and remove him.”

Her grief, persistence and courage are rewarded. Quietly, gently, in a voice she could not have mistaken for anyone else’s, He calls her by name: Mary! Immediately she recognizes Jesus and exclaims: Rabboni, Beloved Master!

He calls, she replies. He is risen. At that moment, everything else is superfluous.

Luke next recounts that later in the day, two disciples were going to Emmaus, ‘a village seven miles from Jerusalem.” Their hopes crushed, they were on their way home, distancing themselves from the terrors of the previous days and trying to come to terms with an uncertain future.

A stranger joined them on the road. It was Jesus, “but their eyes were held and they did not recognize him.” They told him the reason for their dejection; three days after he was crucified and buried, their Master had disappeared from the tomb. Their women were spreading strange stories but “Some friends of our group went to the tomb…but him they did not see.”

Patiently He explained Scriptures to them, but they were unconvinced. As it was growing late, they asked Him to spend the night with them at Emmaus. There, “When they were at table, he took the bread, said a blessing, broke it and gave each apiece.” Only then did the two recognize Jesus, but He had vanished.

But what they had failed to see with their eyes earlier they had felt in their hearts. For as they now realized, ”Were not our hearts filled with ardent yearning when he was talking to us on the road and explaining the Scriptures?” Mysteriously, unexpectedly, anguish had turned to stillness, sadness has given birth to joy.

No such thing for another disciple, however. John explains that when Jesus first appeared to the rest, “Thomas the Twin, one of the Twelve, was not with them.” When told that they had seen the Lord, he replied that he would not believe until he had seen the mark of the nails with his own eyes and put his hand in Jesus’ side.

Eight days later, he got exactly what he asked for. The Risen Christ stood in front of him and said,”Put your finger here and see my hands; stretch out your hand and put it into my side. Doubt no longer but believe.” To which a shamefaced Thomas could only reply, as doubtless all of us will someday:” You are my Lord and my God.”

Beside an empty tomb, on the road to Emmaus, face to face with the Savior: at the sound of His voice, from the glow in our hearts, and at the sight of His wounds, we know that we woill rise as He is risen and rejoice our waiting.

To my brothers in Malaybalay, a blessed Easter.

The View from a Hill

 May 20, 1989

The View from a Hill

Where I try to do my centering every other month or so is atop this small hill amidst rolling fields in the shadow of Mt. Kitanlad in Bukidnon. The Transfiguration is a young community of Benedictine monks whose lives revolve around two basic activities: Ora, prayer, chanted dawn to dusk seven times a day, and Labora, work, which in this instance entails farming a 40-hectare tract planted to coffee, corn, peanuts, rice and bananas.

Launched only eight years ago, this monastic experiment has thrived because vocations have been plentiful and donations generous. In the interim membership has trebled and the number of buildings on site has doubled. Coaxing the land to produce, however, has been slower going.

This particular farm is no del Monte or BUSCO of Nieto-Zubiri fame. Seven kilometres from Malaybalay the landscape and the living is rural and rudimentary. The soil is rocky and acidic. There is water, but it must be sourced far beneath the surface. Rainfall is abundant but with the nearby mountains balding difficult to retain.

The monks are not trained farmers and cannot yet afford machines. Thus everything in the field must be done manually, a back-breaking and time-consuming process. Nevertheless soiling their hands is an absolute necessity because as a not so jovial note appended to a list of field assignments on their bulletin board warns, ”If you do not work, you do not eat!”

For the monks farming in these parts and in this fashion quite often becomes an exercise in frustration. So far only half of the land has been brought under cultivation. When the rains falter the crops wither on their stalks. The cash from corn and peanuts might keep a nuclear family from starving but will not indefinitely sustain 17 full-grown men.

There is barely enough rice for the community’s meals that are 80 per cent staple and 20 per cent viand, but the monks can no more complain about this than they can begrudge that most of their bananas are stolen for if they are vowed to poverty, their neighbours are fated to it, both of them for life.

Coffee which grows well in Bukidnon is a way out of this common destiny. The trees the monks planted four or five years ago are now starting to bear fruit. Last year the beans grossed them less than P100,000. This year they had hoped to do better, but with supply temporarily exceeding demand, Filipro, which controls the market in the area, will pay only P28 a kilo for their produce.

So far for now the monks have 40 large sacks of dried, husked coffee beans that aren’t going anywhere. They will not spoil, but in the meantime there are mounting farm expenses (for lime, fertilizers, water, seedlings) and a sizeable payroll to support. The payroll is for farmhands in the community’s employ, to save them from certain hunger.

And likely mischief. On the next hill shanties have sprouted belonging to former labourers who have been dismissed for thievery and worse offenses. They squat on government property that the monks have applied for to reforest at their own expense to keep the erosion problem under control.

For many months now the monks’ application with the DENR has languished, shunted from one office to another thanks to bureaucratic red tape. As Mr. Factoran’s high rhetoric fails to be matched by his subalterns’ uncertain zeal for nature conservancy, the squatters have grown bolder, refusing to budge, harassing their neighbours and freely living off the fat of other people’s land.

One suspects, in fact, that they and their ilk are up to worse a little further off. Two or three kilometers from the monastery the mountains begin. But three to four years ago they were covered thick top to bottom with towering pine trees, but no longer. There are mysterious bonfires on these mountains almost every afternoon and evening now, swaths of charred timber and ugly gashes the morning after.

But is this any more tragic than what now goes on right at the foot of these mountains? There, in the last two months since my last visit, some unknown Chinaman’s bulldozers and tractors have cleared a vast tract. He will be planting sugarcane.

In a replay of what has been happening on both sides of the highway from Manolo Fortich to Valencia, he has gobbled up many small and medium-sized landholdings, dispossessed numerous farmers and sharecroppers, and uprooted tubers, cereals and fruit-bearing trees wholesale to replace them with the crop that has turned Negros into a hotbed-basketcase.

Vagrants and squatters today, sacadas and insurgents tomorrow. Bountiful soil now, a veritable wasteland by the time this century closes as sugarcane, pineapple, ramie and such steadily sap the earth of its nutrients. Truly grim on final reckoning will be the wages of carelessness and greed in Bukidnon, once thrice-blessed and happy country.

Fuga, tace, quiesce. The monks have come here to seek true freedom of spirit in silence and repose, but the hill on which they pray can no more be isolated from the troubled world below, it seems, than their petitions can ignore the pain and sorrow those who inhabit it are heir to.

But herein precisely lies the very meaning of their monkhood. For in the end theirs is a sign of contradiction. By being in the world though not of it, their seemingly useless, helpless lives bear quiet, gentle witness to that divine mercy which alone avails, transforming human weakness into perfect grace.