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Dry as Dust?
23/October/2007 Filed in: Chapter Talks
Three times a year we read through chapters eight to twenty of the Rule. Three times a year we listen to Benedict's arrangement of psalmody and lessons for the Divine Office with a kind of glazed awareness that most monasteries have adapted Benedict's original schema to one of their own devising. Is there any point in listening again and again to a liturgical code few adhere to nowadays? Would we not do better to omit all the detail of the preceding twelve chapters and skip to the magnificent teaching on prayer in chapter twenty? Perhaps the divine is in the detail. We need to be reminded how our prayer in common has to have a structure; how that structure unites us with the Universal Church — we sing "according to the Roman custom" — and is itself a facet of the "disciplina" that helps us towards God. The liturgical chapters are not easy listening, nor is the quest for God easy. The "disciplina psallendi" is part and parcel of our way towards Him.