St Benedict was well
aware that a practice of contemplative prayer in daily life can be at times a puzzling,
even discouraging process. He therefore
stressed the virtue of ‘stability’, stabilitas,
by which he meant among other things the quality of perseverance. Stabilitas
is the inner commitment of the best part of us, our rootedness in where we are
in the present and in God’s dealings with us.
We are here, not “somewhere over the rainbow”.
What do we do, for instance, when we feel simply reluctant to meditate? What do we do, when we feel we can’t be bothered? What do we do, when we feel a failure in meditation, because, it seems, “nothing happens”? The virtue of stabilitas teaches us a kind of spiritual cussedness -- we sit down as usual and say our word, our mantra. We remind ourselves that our feelings are not the issue, and are anyway a poor guide, and an even worse master. We persevere regardless of what happens… or doesn’t. The beauty is that something is indeed happening, but at a level beyond our surface personality and our anxious judgemental ego. If we let it be, and trust, meditation allows re-creation, we are further along the road.
Benedict was certainly influenced by the teaching of the Desert Fathers and Mothers of the 4th century. The boredom, the aridity, the ‘what is the point?’ was well known to them. They called this paralysing emotion Acedia, or the Noonday Demon.[1] A quote from the desert:
The demon of acedia - also called the noonday demon - is the one that causes the most serious trouble of all. He presses his attack upon the monk [the meditator] about the fourth hour [10 a.m.] and besieges the soul until the eighth hour [2.00 p.m.]. First of all he makes it seem that the sun barely moves, if at all, and that the day is fifty hours long. Then he constrains the monk to look constantly out of the windows, to walk outside the cell, to gaze carefully at the sun to determine how far it stands from the ninth hour [3.00 p.m. the main meal] to look now this way and now to that to see if perhaps one of the brethren appears from his cell. Then too he instils in the heart of the monk a hatred for the place, a hatred for his very life itself, a hatred for manual labour. He leads him to reflect that charity has departed from among the brethren, that there is no one to give encouragement. Should there be someone who happens to offend him in some way or other, this too the demon uses to contribute further to his hatred. This demon drives him along to desire other sites where he can more easily procure life’s necessities, more readily find work and make a real success of himself…
What do we do, for instance, when we feel simply reluctant to meditate? What do we do, when we feel we can’t be bothered? What do we do, when we feel a failure in meditation, because, it seems, “nothing happens”? The virtue of stabilitas teaches us a kind of spiritual cussedness -- we sit down as usual and say our word, our mantra. We remind ourselves that our feelings are not the issue, and are anyway a poor guide, and an even worse master. We persevere regardless of what happens… or doesn’t. The beauty is that something is indeed happening, but at a level beyond our surface personality and our anxious judgemental ego. If we let it be, and trust, meditation allows re-creation, we are further along the road.
Benedict was certainly influenced by the teaching of the Desert Fathers and Mothers of the 4th century. The boredom, the aridity, the ‘what is the point?’ was well known to them. They called this paralysing emotion Acedia, or the Noonday Demon.[1] A quote from the desert:
The demon of acedia - also called the noonday demon - is the one that causes the most serious trouble of all. He presses his attack upon the monk [the meditator] about the fourth hour [10 a.m.] and besieges the soul until the eighth hour [2.00 p.m.]. First of all he makes it seem that the sun barely moves, if at all, and that the day is fifty hours long. Then he constrains the monk to look constantly out of the windows, to walk outside the cell, to gaze carefully at the sun to determine how far it stands from the ninth hour [3.00 p.m. the main meal] to look now this way and now to that to see if perhaps one of the brethren appears from his cell. Then too he instils in the heart of the monk a hatred for the place, a hatred for his very life itself, a hatred for manual labour. He leads him to reflect that charity has departed from among the brethren, that there is no one to give encouragement. Should there be someone who happens to offend him in some way or other, this too the demon uses to contribute further to his hatred. This demon drives him along to desire other sites where he can more easily procure life’s necessities, more readily find work and make a real success of himself…
These feelings may
be eerily familiar: I’m bored; other people are not pulling their weight; I
loathe this place; wouldn’t it be better just to read a book about it all? Perhaps I need a change of church. A walk in
nature would be just as good. Well, the
wisdom is to persevere, stabilitas...
The answer, as is so often the case in
faith, is simply to take the next step. More
is happening than we can possibly know, right now.
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