Page 15 - Priorities #32 2005-November

though they were purchasing a car with options, for example].
Despite the social pressure and the distortions in perception that technology and media can create, Benedictines should commit to providing holistic experiences that help each student to form a self- identity, she said.
Her Top Ten checklist for any Benedictine institution includes:
• Prayer, including interfaith prayer (which the Pope has approved).
• Thoughtful and responsive obedience. The term here refers not to coercion but rather obedience to a process of interior growth that can happen when there is silence and time for reflection.
• Stability in relationships.
• The discipline of daily practice.
• Stewardship of creation—the antithesis of a consumer, throw-away society and the opposite, also, of a “virtual” experience in place of experience with real, tangible materials.
• Humility, used here to mean an outgrowth of wisdom and an ability to be accountable for one’s life. This humility is a major part of St. Benedict’s Rule.
• Communities of mutual service.
• Hospitality—this could be the most noticeable of the Benedictine traits and it means willingness to welcome and see to the comfort of a stranger with strange ways.
• Conversatio, a process that can lead an individual to develop a full sense of his or her humanity.
Three grace notes that Sister Mary adds: she would have Benedictines concerned for justice, accepting of the new information that explains the cosmos, and aware of the individual’s links to God and the creative world within that cosmos. “The young need to know how faith and God relate to the universe...and I’m not talking about pseudoscience.
We can learn to live with truth and what we don’t know,” she said.
Woodside Priory has a history with Delbarton and St. Mary’s Abbey going back half a century when WPS’s founder, Father Egon, arrived at
St. Mary’s as a young monk. He taught theology from 1951 to 1955 while working on his English. Fathers Giles and Beatus, who attended the conference, remember his classes; Father Egon remembers making the students laugh with his mispronunciations and malapropisms, he says.
The April issue of Priorities will carry a report of the nuts and bolts of the conference—the ways in which schools are looking inward and outward to become better stewards of Benedict’s rule. Student exchanges, shared projects between schools, and
a surprising growth of monasteries in developing countries are among the topics.
—C. Dobervich
B-e-net.com is an exciting and beautifully designed tool for working together globally. Check it out!
WPS conference participants are (from upper left) Brother Edward Englund, Tim Molak, John Erkman, Carolyn Dobervich, Therese Inkmann and Ruth Benz. Therese led a workshop on Ecology, and Brother Edward, Tim and John moderated workshop discussions.
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