“The key is paradox”. I am standing outside Thomas Merton’s hermitage, talking to his great friend and fellow Cistercian monk Br Patrick Hart. I tell him that I have just started to read the Rule of St Benedict, and this is his response – words that I recall with gratitude, and now more than ever before . I watch the growing polarisation in politics, in society, in the church. A phrase that I read in a recent copy of The Tablet speaks of “the solidified iciness of certainty”. We are losing the sense of paradox and this is dangerous.

At the very end of this short document – which he modestly calls his “ little Rule for beginners” – St Benedict gives us advice on further reading. He points me on the one hand to the desert eremitical tradition, to the solitary and ascetic, with its emphasis on silence and withdrawal, but then on the other hand  he points to the coenobitic tradition which shows me the role of community and brotherly and sisterly love. He is telling me to be open to two different streams or sources. Both are good, life-giving and both have a role to play in my life. He is showing me how to initiate a dialogue, a conversation, in which both are needed, and by flowing together will promote growth and avoid extremism. Here I am given the example of two things held in balance, in tension. When I apply this to my own interior self I see the importance of nurturing my solitary self, the ability to live with myself alone before God, but equally the role of living in love with my brothers and sisters. 

This holding together of opposites has become something life- enhancing for me, repeated time and again in different forms, like threads in the finely woven tapestry that is the Rule. I have been particularly grateful that the Benedictine vows are not poverty, chastity and obedience. The cornerstone is stability, the foundation of staying still, being rooted, earthed, resisting the pull of trying to escape or to run away. Yet this is held in tension with the second vow conversatio morum which  carries the implication of  journeying on, being open to the new. If I were to emphasise only stability I would live with the danger of becoming static, but by holding the two together I am able to hold onto the ideal of total inner transformation, grounded yet moving forward. 
              
St Benedict knows that we are each one made up of three  elements, body, mind and spirit. Each one has its role to play in achieving the fullness of my own humanity, and each is God-given, enabling me to pursue my path towards God. In the daily horarium that he sets out in the Rule he ensures that there is time and space for prayer, for study and for the work of the hands. This is the pattern that I have come to find is essential for the health and well being of my own self.  Here is a structure to the day. I try to pray, above all the psalms, to feed my intellect and my imagination, and to do something physical. These alternating activities bring equilibrium and prevent my life running into extremism and thus exhaustion. Rhythmn and balance bring me fullness of life.

Hospitality means welcoming the other – that has become a cliché. It is a quality for which St Benedict is widely known: 'Let everyone who comes be received as Christ' is one of the most beautiful texts in the Rule. And yet this loving and warm reception is juxtaposed by the warning afterwards to avoid speaking to the guest. Again I am being shown contradictories. By drawing back I pay attention to my own private ‘enclosure’. Here I am being shown that I must respect and guard the inner self for, if I allow that to be drained by too much giving, then the guest will not find what it is that they had come to seek. There must be the right balance of the inner and the outer.

What the Rule is giving me is a series of open doors, not a closed system. In holding on to this balanced way I am  creating a milieu which will enrich the way in which I live. After all I know only too well the conflicting claims of male and female, of animus and anima, of heart and head. And if paradox speaks to my human condition it is also a vehicle for expressing truths about a God who becomes a man, a victor who rides on a donkey in his hour of triumph, and is crucified on a cross whose arm stretches up to the Father and outwards to the world. Here is the ultimate paradox: the paschal mystery.