A Good Neighbor

Full of practical insights about community, this small book draws on personal experiences, Scripture and the Rule of Benedict. Each of us lives in several communities at the same time, with varying degrees of commitment, and Benson gives examples of how the Rule of Benedict can help in these various relationships. Humility and obedience are not popular words or values in American culture today. Obedience may be best understood as listening, and “humility is what creates the space within us … for obedience to grow.” Humility is called for in order to better listen and serve the needs of those around us.The author points out the danger of neglecting the community in which we live, in search of more distant communities where there are more folks who think like us, and with whom we feel more comfortable. We can then fail to see Christ in the stranger or a neighbor we scarcely know. Serving those in community with us is at the heart of Benedict’s Rule, and it is in ordinary, everyday things that we best serve one another and build community.
Sr. Lenora Black, OSB

Excerpts:

Chapter 1 - A Longing for Community

I am in search of what the Rule can teach us about nurturing fellowship with people with whom we often share only a part of our lives rather than most of our lives.  I am hoping to discover some of what the Rule has to say about building a sense of community with people with whom we share only a small portion of our lives in common.

Is there a way for us to read the lines of a Rule written for a certain kind of community and sicover what is to be found in the lines and between those lines that can help us learn how to more fully live in community with the myriad of communities to whom we moderns have been given?

Chapter 2 - Heroic Humility

Now I expect someone living inside a monastic cdommunity might argue that the key word for living in community in such a context would be obedience.  This may be right, I do not know.  Not having an abbot or an abbess on the prmises of the communities of which I am a part, or even a written rule signed on to by all of the people in all of those communities in which I operate, obedience seems an elusive term.  But I venture to say one cannot get to obedience without going throught humility. 

Chapter 3- A Ready Mercy

Humility helps us shift more and more of our focus away from ourselves and onto others with our communities.  A posture of hones humility increases the likelihood that we will begin to really see and hear what is going on within and around those to whom we have been given and who have been given to us.  And the more we look and listen, the more we can see the need to off mercy to each other.

As anyone who is part of a community known as a family.