Sometimes as I read The Rule of Benedict, the text seems to speak directly, offering a clear word about how I ought to live. But then, on other occasions, as I am reading it, the tremendous differences in time and culture step to the forefront. The title of the chapter I looked at this morning, “How the Excommunicated Should Make Satisfaction,” (RB 44) provides a hint that this will be one of those chapters that emphasize every one of the centuries between the 500s and the 2000s.

In its ten verses, the chapter outlines the steps a monk takes before the community under the authority of the abbot to make satisfaction for the acts that had led to his excommunication both from the oratory and the table. Where does one begin to list the cultural differences?

• Sins have consequences.
• The community exercises discipline.
• The abbot speaks with authority.
• There is a distinction between pardon and satisfaction.

This list presents me with a challenge. When I ask myself the question that helps to guide my journey as a Novice Oblate—How do I live according to the spirit of this Rule?—I am led to wonder about a number of issues. In what communities do I live? I get the sense from reading this chapter that the steps of making satisfaction address the healing of breaches in the community, so identifying my communities is a key first step. My family is the primary community, and probably the closest to the community of the monastery, in the sense that I do not choose my relatives and that we are bound together by God. My community of faith, perhaps ironically, is much less a community. We do not live among other members of that community, so we tend to see them only on Sunday mornings. Other groups, such as my fellow Oblates, or the Lincoln Stamp Club, occupy even more narrow slivers of my life.

Either the bishop or the pastor of our parish technically occupies the role analogous to the abbot. Yet the cultural expectations that might place authority in the hands of either person has been diluted to the point where it’s difficult for me to recognize how they might exercise that authority.

And then, maybe the greatest chasm is the one that opens between a time when a community found strength in pairing the proclamation of grace with the frank recognition that sin bears consequences and in seeking restoration through making satisfaction. I can see that our time differs from Benedict’s on this point, and it makes me wonder whether we have lost or gained by the changes we have made.

It’s one thing to confess a sin to God and to hear, receive, and cling to his promise of forgiveness. But this pardon does not address the ruptures that a sin creates in the community, nor does it address a prescription for healing the breach that a sin creates in relationships. This is, I think, the intent of “making satisfaction.” The abbot, in this chapter, is the one who speaks for the community, who “decides enough satisfaction has been made ” (RB 44:3). I can never, as the one who has sinned against another, decide when satisfaction has been made. Instead, I throw myself, perhaps figuratively, at the feet of the ones against whom I have sinned, and await a word. As Saint Benedict ends the chapter, “Let them keep this up until he blesses them and says, ‘That is enough’” (RB 44:10).

And again, the act which I am called to make is simple: “Listen…with the ear of [my] heart” (RB Prol. 1).

Ut in Omnibus Glorificetur Deus.