We're all to this retreat, and I'm a humble stand-in for Father Peter Damian that was supposed to give this, and I've been asked to take it, so I will certainly give it my own twist. Let's start with a prayer. Father, most loving God, we thank you and praise you for our safe arrival, all of us here to the Hermitage this weekend. We thank you for this opportunity that you've given each one of us to grow in our Christian life, to grow in our relationship with you as Father, Son, and Spirit. We pray that your Spirit, the one who teaches us and transforms us and leads us ever deeper

[01:03]

into the mystery of the Trinitarian life, that your Spirit will open our minds and our hearts this weekend to whatever you wish to speak to us, in whatever way you wish to speak that to us. We ask your blessings upon this retreat time, and may we make ourselves available, open to your presence, as we pray through Christ our Lord. Amen. I'd like to start with a reading from Samuel, 1 Samuel chapter 3, and it's the call that we're all familiar with, the call of Samuel. Now, the boy Samuel was serving Yahweh in the presence of Eli.

[02:09]

In those days it was rare for Yahweh to speak, visions were uncommon. One day it happened that Eli was lying down in his room. His eyes were beginning to grow dim. He could no longer see. The lamp of God had not yet gone out, and Samuel was lying in Yahweh's sanctuary, where the Ark of God was. When Yahweh called, Samuel, Samuel, he answered, Here I am, and running to Eli he said, Here I am, as you called me. But Eli said, I did not call. Go back and lie down. So he went and lay down. And again Yahweh called, Samuel, Samuel. He got up and went to Eli and said, Here I am, as you called me.

[03:15]

But he replied, I did not call you, my son. Go back and lie down. Now as yet, Samuel had no knowledge of Yahweh, and the word of Yahweh had not yet been revealed to him. And so again Yahweh called, the third time. He got up and went to Eli and said, Here I am, as you called me. Eli then understood that it was Yahweh who was calling the child. And he said to Samuel, Go and lie down, and if someone calls, say, Speak, Yahweh, for your servant is listening. And so Samuel went and lay down in his place. Yahweh then came and stood by, calling as he had done before, Samuel, Samuel.

[04:25]

And Samuel answered, Speak, Yahweh, for your servant is listening. Yahweh then said to Samuel, I am going to do something in Israel which will make the ears of all who hear it ring. Now, if you remember all of that story about Samuel who kind of was miraculously conceived and the promise of his mother to give him to the Lord's service if she did conceive a child, so he was given very young to the temple and raised in the temple. So it's amazing to hear that even though he was raised, and we don't know how old

[05:27]

he is here, but perhaps by this time maybe 12 years old or something like that, that the text tells us he did not know Yahweh, and he did not know the word of Yahweh. Well, what was he doing all those years if he's raised in the temple with the prophet Eli and in the service and beside the ark to be able to get so close to the ark of the presence of Yahweh? He probably certainly knew prayers and chants and psalms and had been taught them and chanted them and prayed them. But yet the text says he did not know Yahweh, nor Yahweh's word. And we can see this is true because he did not recognize that presence speaking to him.

[06:29]

He thought it was Eli. He was really completely ignorant of this divine presence in whose house he was being raised and in whose service he was being raised. Is that really possible? Well, I can relate to it in my own life. I was raised a Catholic in the house of the Lord and I was an altar boy since the second grade, which is what, seven years old. And I was brought up in Catholic schools and in a Catholic part of the city, French Catholic ghetto. And Catholic Christianity was all around me and in my home and went to Mass every Sunday and during Lent we went to Mass every day. And I was taught my prayers and I knew the catechism answers.

[07:30]

And yet, like Samuel, I did not know God. I had not yet heard God's word to me. I had not recognized God calling my name. Even though I knew many prayers, I would suggest I did not know prayer like Samuel. I did not know God calling to me in a very particular and personal way. Now, what happened when I was 14 years old and in church, I wasn't beside the Ark of the Covenant, but by the altar, the Eucharistic altar of Jesus Christ, the fullness of the promise of the Ark. And I was going to confession, something I had done hundreds and hundreds of times.

[08:35]

Now, at this particular time, I was going through struggles, even at 14. We had sold our summer cottage the year and a half before and I felt a great sense of loss. It had been my Huckleberry Finn, Tom Sawyer kind of adventure place and it had created a sense of loss and emptiness in me. The year before, I had failed the seventh grade and I had to repeat it, which was a tremendous experience of loss. Fortunately, in one sense, we were moving at the time, so I repeated it in another school. But the move was a loss. We moved from one end of the city to the other in a very unfamiliar place, so a sense of loss. We also moved away from my grandmother, Duval, the red bicycle grandmother, for those of you who know that story on one of my tapes. We moved away from her. I couldn't see her when I wanted and that was a sense of loss.

[09:37]

I was struggling with the repetition of sin in my life. I had come to some kind of awareness that I said the same kind of things in confession over and over again. There was a repeated pattern and I didn't seem to be able to break it. I was trying to and I really felt a sense of powerlessness and weakness to overcome them. Not that I was trying to do it maybe for love of God, but I would say more for my own self image, perhaps, or for a sense of control over my life. Because when you feel all these losses, the natural thing is to want to have control, so no one takes anything else away from you. So all of this was going on in me as I went to confession that day and was in the temple of the Lord and examined my conscience and went in the confessional and said my sins

[10:44]

and received absolution and was kneeling and I was all alone. It was a slow Saturday, confession Saturday and there was no one else in the church. And I started saying my penance. And for some reason, the first time this had ever happened, I became aware of a presence. I knew things about God. I had been told things about God, as I'm sure Samuel had. But this was something very close, up close. Not about someone, but it was a presence. And it was all around me. And I started to weep for my sins because I began to realize that it wasn't so much I had failed to live up to an ideal or that I had broken rules,

[11:46]

but that somehow sin had to do with this presence and my relationship to this presence. And the presence felt like it was embracing me. And then I heard from deep inside of me a word, a voice call my name. And the voice said, I have been here loving you for the past 14 years. It's okay, John. I'm here. I love you. I have been loving you and I always will love you. That was reassuring, but the voice then said, but you have not known me. You have not noticed me here. Well, I wept all the more.

[12:48]

Because then I realized there's really only one sin. The greatest sin is to not be present to one who is continually present to you. It's as if someone faces you and you turn your back. That is fundamental, it seems to me, and that's the great sin, isn't it? To be ignorant of that presence. And suddenly rules and commandments didn't matter so much as that many different ways, even that are not spelled out in the commandments, that I was ignorant of this presence. And I couldn't believe that this presence had been there all these years. I said, you mean you have been here, this loving, caring, forgiving presence,

[13:54]

and how could I not have known you? And I felt at that point being embraced and lifted off the kneeler. Now, please bear in mind, I never had this kind of experience before. And nothing quite like it since. If you want to say it's the watershed experience of my life. And I heard a voice again say, stop trying to stand on your own two feet. And let me hold you, let me embrace you, let me lift you up. Trust me. And then I responded, I said, I don't want to ever ignore you again. How can I make up for the last 14 years of turning my back on you, of being totally oblivious to your presence? What can I do? What can I do? I searched and I searched my mind. And finally I said, I want to belong to you forever.

[14:59]

I want to give my life to you. I don't want to ever turn my back on you again. And so that's when I vowed my life to God. And I had no idea what I was doing. And I told no one about it. Now, I share this experience with you because I believe it was the beginning of true prayer in my life. I had said many prayers before, but there was nothing like what happened then and after that time. It seems to me prayer, true prayer, begins when relationship begins. And it seems that relationship begins when I recognize someone is there. Certainly God was present to me, but can we really say it was a relationship

[16:04]

if I am oblivious? If I do not acknowledge, if I do not respond? Because presence, being, always invites a free response, as it is a free presence. That is the very nature of being, of divine presence, of the mystery. And it's when one recognizes the other and responds, then we can really say relationship begins. It doesn't mean God is suddenly there for me in my life. That's always been true. But the relationship now has begun. And it seems that that recognition of this presence,

[17:05]

this divine presence in my life, has something to do with my presence to myself. This is the strange paradox and mystery. My presence to my own being, to my own mystery. And that means as I really am. In my true situation, in my true condition, which in my experience that I shared with you, I was sort of available for this breakthrough of awareness, because I was poor and I was acknowledging my poverty. I was acknowledging my sense of loss and emptiness and weakness and sinfulness.

[18:08]

I was desperate. But there can be a holy desperation that's very good. It reminds me of when Jesus in John's Gospel, after he's just taught about eating his flesh and drinking his blood, and many leave, and he finally turns to his disciples, his special twelve, and he says, well, are you going to leave me? And Peter says, well, to whom shall we go? It's like, well, we've tried everything else. We're desperate. You're our last hope. There's a wonderful kind of desperation. It seems that that desperation creates a window for us to see God in our life present. And without that posture, that way of standing before God, I'm covered with many fig leaves, like the Adam and Eve story.

[19:12]

Many roles, many persona, many titles, many accomplishments. And they prevent me from seeing through, seeing more clearly this presence in my life. And so prayer begins with relationship. Relationship begins when we stand before God, recognizing God present to us, but standing there as we really are, being present to ourselves. Then there's something very fundamental about prayer there, and you're going to hear me make this distinction between formulas, prayers that can be said, and prayer that is the dynamic between two presences. Therefore, to truly pray requires something else, doesn't it? It requires a relationship.

[20:13]

Presence to presence. Without that, we say prayers. We say many prayers. And that may have some other function and role, maybe leading us to this other kind of prayer. But I want to talk about this other kind of prayer. Thomas Merton once said that true prayer begins when we pray in order to live, when we pray because we must. When prayer becomes like breathing, constant and essential for life. Now that's a man who had said many, many prayers, yet he came to awareness that there are prayers and there's prayer. That is the response of presence to presence. Prayer is simply the many ways that I am present to the Divine Other. God through Christ by the Spirit is always present to us,

[21:18]

yet relationship can only begin when I acknowledge God in my life and respond with my own presence in the many limitless ways available to me through the empowering Spirit of God. God, in fact, makes my presence to God possible. In fact, that which God uses to be present to me is the same thing God provides for me to be present to God. Or should I say the same one? And that's Jesus Christ. He is the medium of exchange. He is the window. He is the doorway. Remember those other texts, the narrow door, the open door. God is present to me through the God-Man. That's precisely why He's the medium.

[22:20]

And I am present to God through that same medium, which involves my humanity. I don't bypass my humanity. But it's that humanity as it has been taken on and claimed and transformed by Jesus Christ who is present in my humanity. In fact, the only person we know to ever have been fully present to God in prayerful relationship all the time is Jesus Christ. Isn't that the proclamation of our church? And so our only hope of being present to this constant presence of God is in Jesus, with Jesus, through Christ. We want to try to find a way of entering into His presence before the Father so that that will be our presence before the Father.

[23:23]

And that's the Spirit, as you know. The Spirit makes Jesus present to us because Christ, well, Jesus, the historical Jesus, is now what the risen Christ in the Spirit. As Paul says, we have an advantage who know Him in the Spirit over those who knew Him in the flesh. Now, moderns don't think that way. We tend to think, oh, if I'd only been there. But it's the opposite, Paul says, because we know Him in the fullness of His glory that transcends time, while the historical Jesus couldn't transcend time. The risen Jesus in the Spirit transcends time, language, culture, generations, centuries. Cosmic Christ. So prayer is our overt response to God's presence, which is always an active presence, by the way, an inviting presence, an initiating presence, an enabling and empowering presence,

[24:26]

alluring presence, as Hosea says, I will allure you, Israel, speaking regarding God into the desert and speak to your heart. The entire Bible is the inspired record of God's presence with Israel, for Israel, as well as Israel's ups and downs. Israel's attempts at being present to God, its successes and many failures, as we hear over and over again. Biblically, to be present to another is expressed, what? Face to face. To be present to another, biblically, is to face that person, to stand face to face. I remember quite a long time ago when I was a student in theology,

[25:27]

I was also taking studies in psychology and I was being trained as a group counselor and in one of our classes, the professor, who was a psychiatrist, had the whole class stand up and form two circles and one group formed an inner circle, holding hands facing outward. The other group formed an outer circle, holding hands facing the inner group. So it was like an inner group and an outer group facing each other. The inner group would stand still. The outer group, he'd have us rotate and we couldn't be any further than, I think it was a foot from the person in front of you. And that's the only instructions he gave. Then he would call time and the outer group would just move. So eventually I would have faced every person on the inner circle until I'd gone all the way around. And he gave no other instructions. And then after, of course, he'd come. The rest of the class was on the dynamics,

[26:29]

because he was teaching us group dynamics, and how some people were looked everywhere but in the face of that person because you were standing so close. It's pretty hard to avoid, but it's amazing how we human beings will come up with a way to avoid presence. Some people were clever enough to look at the person, but they look kind of through them or beyond them. They're really looking at a point in back of them, but it's very clever because it looks like they're not nervous or they're not defending themselves. Some fidgeted and looked to the side and you could see people swallowing their Adam's apple. I was before this one woman, a woman in her fifties, and I've never had an experience like that of face-to-face presence in my life. As I looked into her eyes, I felt so completely drawn in. And as I saw the tears welling up in her eyes,

[27:37]

I'd never been that close to somebody watching emotion arise in them. And I felt I was so intimate and I did not know her. This was the beginning of the course. And I started weeping and I couldn't tell you exactly why, but I was touching something. Something was touching me that was presence, that was larger than the two of us, yet within the two of us. It was an incredible experience and then afterwards, she ran to find me. We wanted to find each other and to talk. It was an example of that biblical notion of presence, face-to-face. There's something in us that longs for that yet is afraid of it. We long even for the Divine Presence

[28:45]

to look at us face-to-face. And you hear that in some of the Psalms, but at the same time, sometimes you'll hear, hide your face from me. Do not look at us, the fear of death of a Jew, any Orthodox Jew, to see God, at least in this life, is too much. You will die. And yet we want it. Prayer, therefore, is about relationship and relationship is about being present to the other at increasingly deeper levels and with more and more of oneself and with greater purity of heart in all the situations of life and in all the stages of one's journey. Prayer, therefore, is a response of presence which begins with recognition of the other leading to praise perhaps or gratitude or conversation

[29:48]

or adoration or petition or questioning or doubt or anger or silence or communion or delight, love, etc. Many, many things can be exchanged. Prayer is simply a way of being with God in a permanent, ongoing way. And there is also an intimate connection between our awakening to God in relationship to this presence and our awakening to others, other human beings in relationship. And I'll talk more about that and why that's in the rule, so much about community and one's relationships with others. There's an intimate relationship between the two. Being present to God and being present to others and being present to another, another human being.

[30:52]

Though they are not exactly the same, they are intimately related just as the two great commandments in the New Testament are not exactly the same, yet they're inseparable, loving the Lord and loving one's neighbor. Jesus says, the second is like the first. Because God is the source of all relationship, of all relationality, of all being, of all communion. Therefore, any form of true relationship has to be some kind of a participation in the source, in God. And every relationship, including our relationship with God, begins with a discovery of that which already is. So it's not starting from zero, zero, and then you create something. I think any relationship

[31:56]

with another human being, with God, is first a discovery of something that's already there that you didn't know was there. Of something shared that you didn't know you shared. Like me with that woman face to face. There was something before we even met that we shared. We only discovered it. So there's something which already is, as well as something which becomes after the already is is discovered. So that woman and I, for the rest of that course, and in our other courses, we started building a relationship upon what we discovered already was. The same is true with God. We discover something which already is, but our response, which is the beginning of the relationship of being present to God's presence, is this something more that's developed. And that's where we get into

[32:59]

certain skills, learning skills, skills for intimacy, skills for relationship. Intimacy between people, as well as with God, takes time. And it takes privacy, time alone, and it takes the risk of self-revelation. Taking the fake leaves off, standing naked before the other. Prayer has to do with how we are with God in response to how God is with us. Now, I say all of this by way of an introduction, kind of a long introduction to our theme this weekend, Prayer and the Rule of St. Benedict. And I think as I go on

[33:59]

through the weekend, you'll see why. I have given this introduction. The Rule of Benedict reflects the pulling together of many, many sources by Benedict, perhaps the primary being Scripture. The early desert monks, we often refer to as the Desert Fathers, St. Augustine, Basil and Basil's Rule. The Rule of the Master. If you've done any reading, you know that's somebody we don't know, but we know he borrowed extensively from the Rule of the Master. Cassian and his Institutes and Conferences. The Roman Cathedral Office, as it was known at that time,

[34:59]

a number of commentators feel that he was significantly influenced by that Cathedral Office in Rome in putting it together in his Rule. But there's also, we can assume, his own upbringing, his own Christian upbringing. Certainly figures in there and most important, I want to stress, his own personal experience of true prayer in his life. His awakening to the presence. When did that happen? When did true prayer begin for him? If you remember a little bit of his background, he was sent to study in Rome by his parents and he found the dissipated lives of the students too much for him. He felt they were abandoning their lives to all kinds of vices and he did not want that

[36:02]

for himself. Perhaps he was fearful that if he stayed in that environment too long he would become infected with these values. And so he seeks solitude and the years spent in the mountain cave before any disciples are attracted to him. Perhaps we could say maybe then is when he really had that profound encounter with the presence. St. Gregory in his dialogue, since our only source of information, other than the Rule itself about Benedict, seems to suggest that when he says he came to himself, to be present to the presence, require I have to be present to myself as I really am. And if one judges, usually disciples come when a person has moved to a certain, I'd say, level of prayerfulness,

[37:03]

prayerful presence to the divine presence. So I think probably that time in the cave alone was a key time of his own awakening to a presence that was personally present to him, calling to him like Yahweh calling to Samuel. And likewise, we can take St. Romuald, the inspirer of the Camaldolese-Benedictine life, and the shock that he received at his father entering a duel and killing a relative. And so he takes the guilt on himself, and he enters a monastery to do penance. We could probably guess too, by the way, that Benedict might have been around 20 years old too when he went to the cave, somewhere around there, and perhaps similarly for Romuald. So he goes into the monastery

[38:04]

to do penance, but something happens to him in the monastery and he never leaves, or at least not the monastic life. He eventually leaves that monastery to explore the solitary life, but he chooses the life of a monk. Something happened to him there. I think perhaps the great awakening happened to him there, the beginning of the relationship. He got caught, and he just couldn't put this to the side of his life. And Romuald himself adopted the rule of Saint Benedict, called it the mother of all rules, but he also added to it. He added to it from some of the sources of Eastern monasticism available to him in Italy at that time. This was before the split, before the split between Rome and Constantinople. So it was the one church.

[39:05]

So we suspect there were Greek influences that he brought in, the whole hesychast tradition, tears, very strong in the Eastern church, and that was very important for him to pray for the gift of tears. And then the aromatical sources, the sources from the Desert Fathers seemed to play a bigger role for him than they did for Benedict, who primarily was concerned with the communal life and not the hermit life. So he takes all of these and adds these and blends these with the rule, emphasizing the life of a monk to be a life of prayer in the spirit, with a particular availability to God in solitude. Now naturally, my own reflections with you this weekend are going to be from the Camaldolese perspective, and it's important you realize that. Camaldolese interpretation of the rule regarding prayer. Prayer

[40:17]

is a responsive presence to a divine presence that I recognize in faith. And I'll be saying more about that later, about faith, the role of faith. So I recognize that presence in faith, to always be there, present to me, loving life and existence into me. I don't necessarily have to feel the presence. We talk a lot today about the experience of God, but so often I think modern people equate that with a sensation, a feeling. There is an experience you can have in faith, but it's not limited to the five senses, you know, sensation and feeling. It's a different kind of experience. God is always present to me, but as we painfully know, we are not always present to God. There is usually one key

[41:23]

in-breaking experience when I realize someone is here with me. And usually for most people that sense of presence is it's outside of me, not within. Normally, it seems to be that way. And eventually, one begins to realize that same presence that I experience out there and maybe mediated from people or nature out there, one begins to move inward to realize the same presence that embraces me is also within the cave of the heart. As Saint Paul puts it in two places, God's love has been poured into our hearts. And then in another place, in Him we live and move and have our being. God, I am in God,

[42:24]

God is in me. And He doesn't shrink Himself or Herself to be in me. The full reality of God is in me. And the full reality of God is around me. Human relationships tend to teach us to find God outside of ourselves. Tend. But I think especially solitude and silence begin to move us inward because there's nothing there to look at, no one there, no nature or a person or an event. So one tends to be moved or directed inwards. And eventually learning to gaze within the heart, and that teaches us the inward presence of God. Generally speaking, we move from presence to presence in its most outward forms

[43:25]

to its most inward dimension, and then eventually to a point where the inward and the outward become less clearly defined. The inward becomes the outward and the outward becomes the inward. It's almost like breathing. If I breathe all in, I will die. If I breathe only out continuously, I will die. It's the interaction of the two that we call breathing. And it's smooth and rhythmic. It's one action and it sustains life. Presence to presence, it seems to me, requires the same kind of development so that I can move inward and outward, and it's not a radical turning around, you know what I'm saying, and not one at the expense of the other, but we don't grow that way. It seems we start with the outward, then we move the inward,

[44:26]

and then eventually there's this very relaxed flow and we can be attentive to God within and attentive to God around us. So to fulfill the Gospel injunction to pray ceaselessly as the early Christians and monks wanted to do requires a constant awareness that I am in the presence of God. However, there is a great distance to be traveled between one's first in-breaking experience of God's presence and a constant awareness of that presence. And that is the spiritual journey. Once you become aware that someone is there with you, your journey has begun. That's the path of endless exploration and discovery and adventure. The classic question for Benedict, to someone who would come

[45:26]

the monastery door and wanting to enter the community, was, what do you seek? The appropriate response was supposed to be something like, well, God. And usually by the fifth day if the person kept persisting, they'd let him in. And that wasn't the end of his trials and probation. But I think for Benedict to seek God is not to seek that which you do not have. The search begins when one realizes one has been found. You cannot be seeking unless you've been found. Possible. So what he means by that is not going from no God to some God and more and more God by the time you're sixty years old in the monastery. I think what he means is to seek God moment to moment.

[46:27]

Realizing how difficult that is. And that we move from moments when we experience God's presence and we are present to God to moments of feeling abandoned. God's abandonment. Or our own lack of presence. And so we want to seek that presence to presence again. We want that same kind of encounter. And that's all that prayer is I think. Is responding to the presence. And so thus monastic life for Benedict is a school set up specifically for this purpose. In my own experience after my experience in the church that I shared with you well what did I do? Because I wanted how do I I remember I told you

[47:30]

I told God that I didn't want to ever turn my back on God I wanted to be present to the presence. And I told nobody about the experience so well I got a statue and put it by my bed so I could look at the image of the statue and of course it was the sacred heart because the experience was one of compassion. Compassionate presence forgiving presence loving presence. And I used to stare at the statue like somebody in love with a girl. And I was I was infatuated with God. But I did not know how to sustain this presence to the presence. So I tried all kinds of prayers and devotions everything the parish life could give me. And I joined the choir and the Sodality and the Legion of Mary and you name it and I tried it. All that was at my disposal that I knew of. I needed a school didn't I? And it's that kind of thing I think Benedict sets up. It's someone who

[48:30]

has become aware of this presence but they're also aware that they don't know how to remain facing God. They don't know how to be present to God in a consistent way. And I think these kinds of people came to the monastery. More often than not. Now we won't treat the exception of children that were brought there at a later period in the development of monasticism. But adults that came there. So that's what I think he means by a school. A place to offer tools as he uses that word tools in the workshop to help me progressively more and more enter into the presence of Christ before the Father. A very gradual lifelong progression. And to do that with other people because they're connected

[49:30]

presence to presence. It's connected with my presence to others and my presence to God. So the point is not saying a lot of prayers or even reading a lot of scripture or fasting a lot or leading a life of asceticism. The point I think is a whole life of awakening to God who as St. Paul says is over all, in all, and through all. I think that's the goal of Benedict and his rule. So to talk about prayer and the rule the original title was prayer in the rule. But in light of what I've been talking about prayer to be how can it be in a rule? It's in a relationship. So I guess the original title they had picked meant the places in the rule that talks about prayer. But even that I think is to misunderstand Benedict. Because the whole thing

[50:34]

is about presence to presence. And when I'm present I pray. Once I've become aware I'm in God's presence I will respond. But there are many kinds of prayerful response. Many, many, many. And we'll be talking about some of those. I'm going to stop at this point. And I hope you all got a sheet with the times. And on that the last two reflections there'll be an opportunity for exchange. Which I think would be good. I'll give you the first half to just mull this over and think about it. Those are a few scriptures if you want, a suggestion. Some questions from tonight's presentation you might want to take for reflection. Just a suggested might be when did you become aware

[51:35]

of the presence in your life? How did you respond to that presence? How do you see prayer? Do you see it the way I've talked about it this evening? As a dynamic of a relationship. The fundamental dynamic of exchange between two presences. How have you grown in this relationship? What tools have you used? What has worked for you and what doesn't seem to work for you? And so tomorrow

[52:37]

we'll dig right into the rule itself to see now, keeping this context in mind, now what's Benedict going to do? This clever man to try to bring you into not only his personal experience of prayer, but one that he sees the pattern of it in the scriptures. And why the scriptures are so important to him. Thank you.

[53:09]

@Text_v004
@Score_JJ