Every night at Compline, we reflect on a short passage from the Rule to remind us of what we are striving to live, and to listen to what the Lord may have to say to us. We offer here our own personal and anonymous reflections, contributed to by the whole community. We hope that, by sharing in our spiritual life, you will be able to explore further your own.
How often do we begin a task with great enthusiasm and even great plans… and then become distracted or discouraged at the first hurdle! This rather terrifying passage of the Rule, which seems to end in nothing but disaster (eternal punishment, no less), is a very stern and powerful reminder of how, even beginning something with the best intentions, we can end up so far from where we first wanted to be. St Benedict’s advice is this: ‘pray for the help of the Lord Jesus, because on your own you will do no good.’ It may be tempting to think that we can achieve what we need to without any help: ‘I have years of experience behind me, and no reason to doubt that I will succeed’. Whether you apply this to a career, a business plan, a social project, or the spiritual life, the challenge remains: ‘what makes you so confident?’ Nobody can foresee the next obstacle, and nobody knows whether they will have the strength or skill to combat it. But St Benedict knows that, if we truly entrust our lives to the Lord, he will not fail us, even if we do not achieve what we thought we wanted; instead, we will gain what we never thought possible. This help is not just towards some personal project, but towards a loving relationship with God himself, who is the foundation and summit of our happiness.
In his Tenth Conference, St John Cassian, one of the founding fathers of western monasticism, and a major influence on St Benedict, said that we should make our own the prayer, ‘O God, come to my assistance’, repeating it at every opportunity—and I mean every opportunity!
‘Meditate on it while sleeping and eating and attending to the least needs of nature.’
But, ambitious as his vision of the spiritual life sounds, he offers this verse for meditation as a very practical solution to the stresses and temptations we are bound to come across every day:
‘This verse should be poured out in unceasing prayer so that we may be delivered in adversity and preserved, and not puffed up in prosperity.’
Nobody is ever safe from temptation, and one never knows in what form or when it will knock on the door of the mind. Cassian reminds us of this, and firmly believes that making this prayer our own will bring us closer to God. And perhaps Cassian’s voice echoed in the back of St Benedict’s mind as he wrote the above section of his prologue, saying:
‘You should, I say, meditate constantly on this verse in your heart. You should not stop repeating it when you are doing any kind of work or performing some service or are on a journey.’
This way of praying—meditating on a short phrase—has a long tradition in the East, in the form of the ‘Jesus prayer’, repeating again and again these or similar words: ‘Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.’ This is a prayer of the heart, using the name of Jesus not simply as a word on which to concentrate one’s attention, but the focus of one’s growing love of the person Jesus; this is the name of a person who loves me, and on whom I come to depend, as a lover depends on their spouse, the more time I spend with him. So, asking for this Divine assistance isn’t simply a request for help to achieve a goal, it is the expression of a desire to be united more fully with Jesus in every moment of the day – a desire parallel to that of a husband and wife for each other. This, after all, is the aim of St Benedict’s Rule: to bring us to that happiness which does not fade; to bring us completely to God.
Read last week's reflection here