Whether you voted LEAVE or REMAIN in the European Referendum, it may be useful, as oblates, to reflect on that word “Vote”, which derives from the Latin word “votum”, related to the verb “Voveo”, “I vow, devote”. That puts a somewhat different slant on it. When monks take their vows, when oblates make their oblation, they are devoting themselves to God and, through Christ, to one another, in the belief that this self-giving, modelled on Christ, is precisely what makes the world turn around, what makes the difference between a world that is centred on me and a world that is centred on love. How many of us, while voting the other day, thought of ourselves as making a vow, or devoting ourselves, giving ourselves? Yet this is at the roots of the democratic system.
Our Holy Father Saint Benedict says that we are to promise obedience, conversion of life, and stability. We are to be listeners, that is; we are to realise that our behaviour and our way of life needs to be different from that of others with no faith, not because we want to be showy, but because we want to be free, and we would like them to share in the same freedom. In a world where the satisfaction of every instict, every whim, is instantly attainable (at least for the rich) Saint Benedict teaches us that this is in fact a form of slavery, which we must campaign against by the way we live.
And we are to be stable: not merely a sense of keeping the balance and “not rocking the boat”, but sticking at it, through thick and thin, through those inevitable moments of crisis, of darkness, when God seems to be absent and life no longer makes sense. So many people out there suffer from this, but have no access to the mystical tradition that we, thank God, do have–a tradition that tells us that we are never closer to God than when we can’t see him, that dying we live. It is the paschal mystery of the death of Christ, lived out in our lives.
As we approach the feast of Saint Benedict, Patron of Europe, we could well pray for the Europe we are leaving behind, that it may find both renewed faith and peace, and pray for our country, in which we oblates are to be a ferment for reconciliation, mercy, justice. By putting God first, by preferring nothing to the love of Christ, we shall become, be it only in a very humble way, a beacon of light and a compass pointing out the way.
Fr Mark Hargreaves OSB
Oblate Master, Prinknash
