The Prologue

I found Benedict’s Rule on a free book table. It’s the red one from 1980. For seven years it’s moved with me across the country, never once having been read. The cover has faded. Sometimes, I see it on the shelf when I’m looking for something else. The pages are crumbling at the corners. “I need to read this,” I say to myself.

Sitting down now with the Rule’s Prologue, I notice first the notes along the margins. There are two different hands, presumably from two different previous owners – a thick blue pen and a faded unsharpened pencil. Phrases are underlined like “nothing harsh, nothing burdensome” or “a little strictness in order to amend faults.” At the bottom of the page, in pencil: “from fear to love – run.” Now, in my own hand, I underline the first sentence: “Listen carefully, my son.”

There is a lineage here. There is a tradition to listen to and to be in conversation with that runs, not just from my hand back to the blue pen and to the faded pencil, but back to the hand that wrote it. The Rule, on crumbling pages, has been read and copied and commented upon and laid on free book tables by people for centuries. Its manuscripts have been illuminated with stunning decoration. People have staked their lives upon its guidance. 

Commentators point out that this lineage runs beyond Benedict to the other great figures who preceded him: Anthony the Great, Pachomius, the Desert Fathers. But this burning thread runs back even to the Judean wilderness and John the Baptist, “a voice crying out in the desert.” 

There is something about the desert and the wilderness. “Every truly new word begins in the desert,” one writer has said. It is “the uninhabited land where nothing … pretends to be what it is not.”¹ For Benedict, the desert was a cave outside of town. These are the primordial places where it is finally silent enough to hear. 

The word of the desert and the word of the cave is one of repentance. “Repent,” the Baptist says. “The kingdom of heaven is at hand” (Mt 3:2). It is the same with Benedict. “The labor of obedience,” he says, “will bring you back to him from whom you had drifted through the sloth of disobedience.” Or again: “While there is still time… we must run and do now what will profit us forever.” Or again: “This message of mine is for you,” but only “if you are ready to give up your own will, once and for all.”

The lesson of the cave and the lesson of the desert is the same: I can change. I must change. This is what the Desert Fathers knew. This is what my ancestors with the blue pen and the unsharpened pencil knew. This is what Benedict knew and tried to communicate: “Listen carefully, my son, to the master’s instructions, and attend to them with the ear of your heart.” I can change.

Again, I say, setting down the book, “I need to read this.”

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^{1 Erasmo Leiva-Merikakis, Fire of Mercy, Heart of the Word, vol. 1.}

About anthony rosselli

Anthony Rosselli is the Director of Evangelization at Our Lady of Peace Catholic Church in Columbus, Ohio and an adjunct professor of theology at Ohio Dominican University. He has a PhD in theology from the University of Dayton. Read his work at rosselli.substack.com.