There is no mention of our Lady in the Rule of Benedict. Her name does not come up once and devotion to her does not feature. But then, nor is their any mention in RB of daily Mass, still less Exposition of the Blessed Sacrament. Is this omission significant?
2 February is Candlemas, the Feast of the Presentation of the Lord, so perhaps as this month opens with this celebration, we can perhaps consider it here. It is one of the most ancient of the Church’s celebrations, emphasising that our Lord’s family was conforming to the Jewish law that required all first born boys to be presented to God in the Temple forty days after birth. (25 December plus 40 days is 2 February of course.) We are reminded by this of Benedict’s emphasis on the value of obedience and humility. RB 7:55 is the eighth step of humility and stresses the wisdom of tradition—which of course Benedict beautifully exemplified by copying chapter 7 word for word from monastic tradition!1
For Benedict, Jesus is to be our exemplar and we need look no further. That task is beyond us, if we are honest, so that RB proclaims itself merely a handbook for beginners only (RB 73:8)! Simeon takes the child Jesus in his arms in the Temple and proclaims, “With my own eyes I’ve seen your salvation; it’s now out in the open for everyone to see: a God-revealing light to the non-Jewish nations, and of glory for your people Israel”.2 “The Word became flesh and blood and moved into the neighbourhood. We saw the glory with our own eyes, the one-of-a-kind glory, like Father, like Son, generous inside and out, true from start to finish.”3
His mother had of course, if we are to believe Luke, made the Song of Hannah4 her own and proclaimed, “God took one look at me, and look what happened—I’m the most fortunate woman on earth! What God has done for me will never be forgotten.”5
Forgetting the somewhat primitive and almost blasphemous idea that a woman needs purification after birth, let us focus on this recognition of the Divine in the human baby. Hannah’s baby became a great prophet of Israel; Mary’s child was God himself taking on human flesh.
It is this focus on the doctrine of the Incarnation found in the feast we celebrate at Candlemas, the ‘light to lighten the gentiles’ that we need to hold fast to. By our baptism we are called, like Mary, to emulate the divinity of her Son, to ‘be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect’ and our attachment to Benedict’s Rule is but one of the ways we oblates have chosen to try to do this.
“We make a grave mistake in our spiritual lives,” says Basil Hume OSB, “if Mary has no part. It is at our peril if we fail to understand her rôle in the life of her Son and in our own lives. Immaculately conceived, she is able to love as can no other creature: she has loved the God whom—tradition tells us—she served from early childhood, the Son whom she bore, and ourselves who, by this same Son, were commended to her at the most solemn moment of his life.”6
Simon Bryden-Brook
Oblate of Douai
1 Chapter 7 is generally acknowledged as not St Benedict’s work but taken from the Rule of the Master.
2 Luke 2:30-32 Eugene H Peterson The Message, Catholic/Ecumenical Edition (Chicago, ACTA, 2013)
3 John 1:14 [Peterson]
4 1 Samuel 2:1-10
5 Luke 1:48-49 [Peterson]
6 Basil Hume, Searching for God (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1977) p 198
