Do you have a minute? Do you know how to live rightly? Do you want to know how to live as God wants us to live? Do you have a monk to help you with finding your way through
life? I do. There’s a monk who will help you in your search for God: One Minute Monk.
The search for meaning and substance in one’s life is perennial. Seeking God, quaerere Deum, is the first mark of the Rule of Saint Benedict: does the person truly seek God? Hence you might say that a basic impulse for those wanting to be monks and nuns, or as oblates and average people, is the desire of God. Pope Benedict spoke of the life of the monks and nuns in a speech he gave at the Collège des Bernardins: Meeting with representatives from the world of culture, 12 September 2008:
Amid the confusion of the times, in which nothing seemed permanent, they wanted to do the essential – to make an effort to find what was perennially valid and lasting, life itself. They were searching for God. They wanted to go from the inessential to the essential, to the only truly important and reliable thing there is. It is sometimes said that they were “eschatologically” oriented. But this is not to be understood in a temporal sense, as if they were looking ahead to the end of the world or to their own death, but in an existential sense: they were seeking the definitive behind the provisional. Quaerere Deum: because they were Christians, this was not an expedition into a trackless wilderness, a search leading them into total darkness. God himself had provided signposts, indeed he had marked out a path which was theirs to find and to follow. This path was his word, which had been disclosed to men in the books of the sacred Scriptures. Thus, by inner necessity, the search for God demands a culture of the word or – as [Benedictine Father] Jean Leclercq put it: eschatology and grammar are intimately connected with one another in Western monasticism (cf. The Love of Learning and the Desire for God). The longing for God, the desire for God, includes the love of learning, love of the word, exploration of all its dimensions. Because in the biblical word God comes towards us and we towards him, we must learn to penetrate the secret of language, to understand it in its construction and in the manner of its expression. Thus it is through the search for God that the secular sciences take on their importance, sciences which show us the path towards language. Because the search for God required the culture of the word, it was appropriate that the monastery should have a library, pointing out pathways to the word. It was also appropriate to have a school, in which these pathways could be opened up. Benedict calls the monastery a dominici servitii schola. The monastery serves eruditio, the formation and education of man – a formation whose ultimate aim is that man should learn how to serve God. But it also includes the formation of reason – education – through which man learns to perceive, in the midst of words, the Word itself.
Abbot Placid is hosting One Minute Monk as a way to help us seek God and to live rightly. Abbot Placid is the religious superior of the monks at Belmont Abbey and Chancellor of Belmont Abbey College is presenting concrete ways for us to seek God by using technology to make the Rule of Saint Benedict accessible. He’s showing us the “signposts” for the path to God and for good living that Pope Benedict says God has already given to us. The Rule of Saint Benedict is timeless because its proposal corresponds to desires of our heart and One Minute Monk will help you understand these desires.
To order a copy of the Rule of Saint Benedict visit this link.
In the Catholic press…