A Monastic Lesson

At last Saturday’s meditation we were blessed to have Sister Chan Duc of the Plum Village Buddhist community with us (you can watch the video by clicking here). Among the many wonderful things she said, several people emailed afterward to say they were struck by what she said about the simple act of eating a piece of bread.

Connecting this with the Christian Eucharist, she reminded us that when we hold a piece of bread in our hands, we are holding something quite extraordinary – that if we know how to look deeply, we can become aware of all that has helped bring us this bread.

Looking deeply, the bread is so much more than simply a source of calories, something to be quickly consumed. We can see the soil, the rain and the sunshine, the farmer, the baker. We can become aware of the whole interrelated cosmos in the little piece of bread in our hand. We can enjoy it with deep gratitude. We can receive it as the body of Christ.

The practice of taking care

Some 1,500 years ago in his Rule for monastic life, St Benedict offered a simple practice to aid deep seeing and reverence: taking care of the goods and tools of the community (see Chapters 31 and 32).

For Benedict, even the most ordinary aspects of life are bound up with the spiritual path. The tools of the monastery should be cared for ‘as if they were the sacred vessels of the altar.’ Treating everything with reverence and care becomes a key contemplative practice. The chalice on the altar. The spade in the garden. Both are to be handled with reverence.

The moment-to-moment practice of care is seen as part and parcel of forming a school of love in community. The spiritual life is not confined to formal times of prayer or church, but encompasses how we sweep the floor, how we pick up a tool, how we put it down again, how we eat a piece of bread. Benedict’s guidelines reflect a sacramental view of the world. Material things matter. Creation matters. Nothing is simply ‘ordinary’ when we learn to see deeply. How we treat things reveals something about our inner life, our spiritual awareness.

Nothing is ordinary

Skim-reading the Rule, you might be forgiven for thinking that here is some ancient advice about cleanliness or order. But something much deeper is being communicated. Benedict links taking care with learning to live an undivided life, a life in which nothing is excluded from our spiritual attention. He dissolves the divide between ‘sacred’ and ‘ordinary’. The reverence given to the chalice is extended to the rake and broom. Reverence is not reserved for the altar. It is to be practised in the storeroom, the garden, the kitchen.

The material world is not simply something to be used up and cast aside—it is to be honored, tended, cherished.  To care for a tool with reverence is to say, ‘this, too, is a gift from God.’  Benedict is inviting us to cultivate a way of seeing, and a way of being, that springs from gratitude and humility.

The saying invites us to see Christ not as absent from the material world, but to encounter Christ as indwelling presence within the whole of creation. Handling things with care, we cultivate an orientation of heart that helps us see the sacred not as a special category of objects or places, but as a quality of presence. A presence we can open ourselves to when we sweep the floor, cut a slice of bread, when we oil a tool and place it gently back in the tool box.

An atmosphere of care

Benedict reminds us that how we treat objects reveals how we treat people. If we are careless with the spade, how will we be gentle with a soul?  If we waste and discard what we find inconvenient, what do we do with the difficult parts of ourselves? The world is met as a mysterious gift, not as simply a resource to be used and managed. This quality of attention is more than mere focus, mere concentration. Loving attention is reverence in action.

When we move through the day with care, with reverence even for the smallest of things, this caring does not remain confined to the things we touch, but radiates out. Moment by moment, breath by breath, we can cultivate an atmosphere of care that becomes a gift to those around us. We are saying, with our hands and hearts: God is here; God is now; God is love.