 A GOOD LIFE: Benedict's Guide to Everyday Joy
This book began, as many of my books often do, with a question. This particular question was from the Rule of Saint Benedict — Is there anyone here who yearns for life and desires to see good days?
I am in search of good days, but no more or less than you and the person standing next to you are. I am also in search of enough good days to make a life, maybe even a good life.
‘We live our lives in search,’ wrote Frederick Buechner once. We search, he wrote, ‘for a self to be, for other selves to love, and for work to do.’ These are not new things that we moderns are searching for; they are as old as the hills.
The struggle to find others with whom we can share our lives, others who give our lives texture and color and meaning, has been going on forever. The task of finding work to do that is fulfilling and productive and sufficient for our needs has been constant. The need for rest and sustenance and time apart has been never-ending. Our hope and our yearning and our desire for God, and a life lived with God, has been everlasting, from age to age.
The world is not a simple place. It never really was. But it is clear that with the noise and the pace and the demands of life in the information age — if that is still the name for the age in which we are living — the struggle to balance all of those things becomes more and more difficult, and more and more necessary.
We are asked by the communities of which we are a part — our families, our neighborhoods, our churches, and all the rest — to do more, not less. In the places where we work, we are asked to be more productive, more efficient, to work longer and harder. We are seldom encouraged to rest and we are seldom asked to slow down.
We are bombarded by information and by noise, and we are conflicted by our priorities and our choices and our time constraints. We are given lots of power tools — faxes and computers and telephones and automobiles — and yet we still have only the one mind and the one heart and the one spirit. We have only a certain amount of strength and a finite number of hours in the day and these two hands.
How then to wrestle with all of those things, how then to wrestle our way into a life of good days that will yield up some sense of the life for which we yearn? How then to balance all of those competing voices and demands and tensions — some of them good, some of them not so good, and some of them simply omnipresent — with our longing to be with God?
In a world that keeps asking us to go higher and faster, how do we begin to go deeper, into the place where God lives and moves and has his being within us?....
It is the Rule of Saint Benedict that…gives us a glimpse of how to balance our lives between prayer and work and community and rest. Thomas More, a writer who once lived in the monastic world, once said, ‘In the midst of our lives we can live the spirit of this rule.’ More and more, I am coming to see that is true. And that it can change us.
I am still trying to learn to turn my longing for the presence of God at all times into something that more closely resembles being aware of the presence of God in all things. And to learn how to order my life in such a way that there is balance between my prayer and my rest and my work and my community. And to go from working without stopping to praying without ceasing.
And I am convinced that there are some secrets hidden in the writings of an old monk.
Excerpted from The Good Life by Robert Benson
(Paraclete Press, copyright 2004, ISBN 1557253560 )
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