The Counsel of Dead Monks

Today is the 15th Anniversary of the death of one of my spiritual mentors - Dom Basil Pennington O.C.S.O. His book, Centering Prayer, greatly influenced me when I read it not long after the turn of the millennium. I am thinking I might like to reread Dom's book in the near future.

The Centering Prayer movement took some flak when it began in the 1970’s. Some Christians [Protestants and Catholics alike] insisted that the method of prayer too much resembled the Transcendental Meditation practices of the Orient. Centering prayer is not T.M. Centering prayer may resemble T.M. but it is not T.M. I think one of the reasons for the lack of Christian understanding where centering prayer is concerned is the lack of understanding regarding contemplative prayer in general and that, before the East-West Schism in 1054, these prayer methods were common in the Church.

The Western Church downplayed the interiority of a prayer life that led to mystical experience. The Eastern Church respected, upheld, and protected what the Western Church downplayed. Only in the last century did the West begin to rediscover the practice, and largely because of the life and work of another Trappist Monk at the Abbey of Gethsemane named Thomas Merton [Another important mentor in my life and journey toward Catholicism]. These westerners did not go traipsing off to the Orient to borrow and Christianize some ancient Oriental religious practices.

Father’s Merton, Pennington, and Keating were instrumental in pointing me toward the Christian monks and hermits of the deserts and mountains in the East.

On this 15th Anniversary of his death, I pray, Eternal rest grant unto Dom Pennington, O Lord, and may perpetual light shine upon him.

I had an interesting encounter a few days back with someone who expressed her opinion about a reflection on the Rule of Saint Benedict that I had shared with a group of Benedictine Oblates. That particular reflection was the conclusion of a series of reflections on the counsel of Saint Benedict given in Chapter Four of the Rule of Saint Benedict. The chapter title is “The Tools of Good Works”.

She took serious exception to the reflection and called it ghastly. The reflection must have mussed her hair and scrubbed the shine off of her neatly polished shoes. She kept insisting that I was in danger of turning my spirituality inward and that I needed to keep an outward focus. I find her counsel to be dangerously sad; especially coming from someone who claimed to have made her Oblation as an Oblate of Saint Benedict fifty years ago.

To whom has she turned for spiritual direction during these fifty years? Who has been her mentors? I need to consciously avoid them and, rather, continue following the counsel of some dead monks.

https://myoblatereflections.blogspot.com/2020/05/living-rule-tools-of-good-works.html