Discipline

Almost three years ago, our first group of Benedictines at St. Martin’s met.  Our challenge was to read from the rule and the Psalms daily.  At the beginning, filled with the spirit of a new endeavor, I was enthusiastic and faithful.  I read C.S. Lewis’s understanding of the Psalms; Merton’s; Bonhoeffer’s.  I bought a Psalter.  Every two months I worked through all 150 Psalms.

In the second year, I was not so disciplined.  I made a CD with Psalms 67 and 51 at the beginning; Psalms to start each day as I drove to work; the daily morning prayer Psalms prescribed by Benedict.  Occasionally, I pulled out the Psalter.  However, this misses the spirit of the readings:  we are not to read the psalms we love; we are to read all the psalms.

Recently, as we began to read the chapters about the order of Benedictine worship, I realized that I had abandoned the Psalms altogether.  Benedict’s prescription for worship always seems so hard to follow, until the end of the chapter.  Here, he tells us to be sure to read all of the Psalms each week.  He allows us to change the order if we need to.  But, 150 Psalms?  This is discipline: to read faithfully each of the psalms whether we are in the mood or not, whether the message seems to fit our lives at that moment or not.  This is the discipline and the challenge.

When we began to follow in the footsteps of Benedict, we agreed to follow the format found in the Psalter in the Book of Common Prayer.  In this sequence, all of the psalms are read each month.  We made one amendment. The Psalter assigns readings for each day of the month, prescribing some readings for the morning and some for the evening.  We agreed to read the morning Psalms on the odd months (Jan., Mar, May, July, Sept., Nov.) and the evening Psalms on the even months.

So, as is often true of the Benedictine’s discipline, I begin again.  To misquote the rule:  We read, after all, that our ancestors, energetic as they were, did this all in a single week.  Let us hope that we, lukewarm as we are can achieve this in the course of two months.