Benedictine spirituality is well known for its delight in balance. The famous dictum, “Ora et labora,” captures in three words the search for balance between prayer and work. The traditional vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience, when adapted for oblates, become sufficiency, stability, and obedience. This balances the ideals of the religious life with the realities of daily life outside of the monastery. There really doesn’t seem to be any part of life that is too small, too mundane, to lie beyond the reach of St. Benedict’s striving to aid his followers in finding balance in their lives.

This morning I read chapter 39, “The Quantity of Food,” in his Rule. One passage, in particular, spoke to me. St. Benedict writes, “For there is nothing as out of place in a Christian life as gluttony. As Our Lord says: ‘See that your hearts not be loaded down with drunkenness’” (RB 39:8-9). Brother Terrence G. Kardong comments on this passage, noting that “Benedict reveals himself as somewhat of a puritan” in elevating gluttony/drunkenness to the extremes of sin incompatible with the Christian life (Benedict’s Rule: A Translation and Commentary, p. 325.). While that seems technically true, it feels a little harsh to me, especially when viewing gluttony in the bigger context of the goal of finding balance in life.

The virgule joining gluttony and drunkenness points to the fact that these two English words stand as translations of the Latin crapula. So when St. Benedict warns against eating too much, of getting food and the body’s needs out-of-balance, he ties this, as a spiritual issue, to the passage from Luke 21:34, where Christ “warns against whatever might cause lack of vigilance” (Kardong, p. 325). This says to me that the ideal of finding balance in life entails keeping one’s heart from “be[ing] loaded down,” from being so sated and dulled by excess, whether of food or drink or any of the “crapula” of life, that one loses the capacity to discern the presence of God in his Word and Sacraments and in the faces of the people in one’s life.

Portion control is one of the popular phrases that come up in conversations about nutrition and dieting. It’s the notion that one can eat healthfully, not by launching into a fad diet of cabbage soup or all meat or whatever, but by exercising discipline over the quantity of food on one’s plate. It’s a matter of eating a balanced diet and of balancing the quantity of food with the need for the energy the food supplies.

It seems to me that just as I feel better physically when I eat reasonable portions, I will feel better spiritually when I seek reasonable portions of all things in my life. This is what I find so deeply attractive in the ideal of sufficiency. It leads me to ask more often of more parts of my life, “What is enough? How can I seek and maintain balance?” I am finding that as I extend this practice to more of my life, I am growing less “loaded down,” less dulled to the presence and power of God at work in both the holy and mundane realms of my life.

Ut in Omnibus Glorificetur Deus.