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The Art of Everyday Life
The modern man lacks order, prayer,
internal peace, he misses him himself.
To regain control over ourselves, and internal spiritual joy
it is proper to search for a path to a Benedictine monastery.
All of us at times are longing for silence and for separation from the turmoil of the world.
Related to this feeling is a deeper understanding for meditation and contemplation.
More and more often we look with curiosity beyond the monastery’s walls.
One of the best known monasteries, which remembers the times of its creator, St. Benedict, soars up the hill of Monte-Casino.
However, one does not need to go to Italy to visit a Benedictine Monastery.
One of them is located in a small village called Lubin, near the town of Koscian in western Poland.
It was founded by Polish King Boleslaw II The Bold,
was later often destroyed and burned, as it was not merely a passive witness of Polish history,
and until today it runs up its tower high into the sky...
Benedictines arrived in Lubin about the year 1070 from Laodium in Lotharingia – today’s Liege in Belgium.
The Lubin Temple, originally of Romanesque architecture,
rebuilt into gothic style, and later into baroque one with rococo elements
belongs to the most precious architectural monuments of Greater Poland.
The Lubin Monastery, like thousands of other Benedictine Monasteries,
grew out of a single desire: so that the God is glorified in everything.
The words – “That God May Be Glorified in All Things”,
were written by St. Benedict into his famous “Rule” for monks,
in the chapter dealing with the monastery’s craftsmen,
to enlighten us, that even the most prosaic acts of our everyday life, could become a great spiritual training.
When van Morrison sings - “Enlightenment, don't know what it is - Chop that wood ad carry water”
– it is surely close to the spirit of St. Benedict.
Benedictines never avoided diverse work.
They never artificially divided it into physical and mental sorts.
Some of Lubin's monks were known as spiritual teachers,
some as supervisors of renovation of the historical monument.
Some work in a garden, the others lead the nursery garden for shrubs and saplings,
some other as retreat teachers
there is one who unearths the beauty hidden in flowers…
As it is for work, so is for prayer that it adopts diverse forms
– it should however always involve the man as a whole: his mind, heart and body
– as the answer for the Spirit’s Breath of Life, which “prays for us in invocations that we cannot express in words”.
Traditionally, the Benedictines' forms of prayer are:
recitations and singing of Psalms,
spiritual reading and meditation
leading to contemplation and prayer in silence and solitude in the presence of God.
“Those who fear You will see me and rejoice for I hoped for Your word. I know, O Lord, that Your judgments are just, and in faith You afflicted me.
May Your kindness be now to comfort me, as Your word to Your servant. May Your mercy come upon me so that I shall live, for Your Torah is my occupation.
May the willful sinners be shamed for they condemned me falsely; I shall converse about Your precepts.
The glory of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. World without End.”
If I was asked today, after several years of meditation in the Benedictine Monastery,
I was to tell what is the meditation in my life –
– I would express it with such words:
Meditation is the word and the silence,
it is the dancing and singing
the hardship, breathing and dwelling.
Meditation is the word and the silence, because ...
we need both words and silence to enter into stillness, in which God speaks to us.
Meditation is the dancing and singing, which accompanied the prodigal son, when he returned to his father.
It is the breathing, because it is the breather, giving us strength for the continuation of our journey.
It is a hardship, as one of the Desert Fathers said:
“There is no harder work than the prayer”
Meditation is also a dwelling, the stepping into the house of the Father, where ,any dwellings are/
“The LORD hath done great things with us; we are rejoiced.
Turn our captivity, O LORD, as the streams in the dry land. They that sow in tears shall reap in joy.
The glory of the Father and Son and Holy Spirit. World without End.”
Speaker: Father Jan M. Bereza, OSB
Realization: Polish Television SA, Poznan, Poland
Translation and captions: Mirek Sopek, http://sopekmir.blogspot.com