Page 11 - Priorities #33 2006-April

What Makes Us Benedictine? A Faculty Retreat Examines The Question
Woodside Priory School devotes one faculty retreat per year to refreshing and re-committing as a community to the Benedictine tradition. On February 17, 2006, the community of teachers and staff spent the day at a lovely center in the Los Altos hills.
Sister Suzanne Zuercher, OSB,
president of Saint Scholastica Academy
in Chicago and a presenter with Principal
Anne Matz, described her own experience in defining “a Benedictine school.” At the end, they asked everyone in attendance to come up with and share his or her own definition.
When asked the question 12 years ago by one of St. Scholastica’s trustees, Sister Suzanne said the definition was “in her bones” and “in the walls” and people just absorbed the Benedictine way by experiencing it. The trustee gently suggested that some actual words were needed. And so she began to write down what 15 centuries of history and her own experience had taught her.
History is important because Benedictine tradition isn’t like other religious or educational traditions, she said. The Rule, written in the sixth century for a small group of monastics, explicitly stresses love for learning, sense of balance, respect for the individual, stewardship of gifts, and the importance of community.
Benedictine Letter
She found a provocative contemporary definition in a lecture titled “Vision for Transformative Education” given by Thomas Merton, a prolific writer, poet and Trappist monk (Trapists are a branch oftheearlyBenedictinefamilytree). Thepurposeof a monastic school, Merton said, is to help a student become wise, and to move beyond knowledge to melding knowledge into the student’s life. Beyond classroom learning, it needs a tradition of experiences shared by teachers and learners, he said.
Some of the specifics Sister Suzanne mentioned include an education that is always evolving and is different from school
to school but at the same time gains stability from the Rule. “I rejoice that Benedictine education so easily embraces people of diverse cultures, races and religions, because the boundaries of varied beliefs had not come on the scene until after Benedictines were already there.” The Benedictine value of listening
and of respecting the voices of the young were especially meaningful to her, she said.
Anne Matz spoke as a non-monastic heading
a monastic school. Making a commitment to the community, knowing that “this is my place and always will be” is important, she said. She also spoke of the unique view of a “learning community” in allowing one’s role to change over a lifetime. People don’t expect to be in the same job forever, and they don’t look at a change as a “demotion.” Rather, it is a matter of reassessing the community’s need and the individuals’ needs and abilities within the community. It is different from the typical “career path” approach to planning one’s life, she explained.
Throughout the day they shared their own experiences in delivering a Benedictine message along with the necessities of academic life, and at several points stopped to ask the retreat participants to do the same.
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‘I rejoice that Benedictine education so easily embraces people of diverse cultures, races and religions . . .’
In the last issue, the web address for B-E-NET, the international Benedic- tine educators’ website, should have been www.b-e-net.org (not .com). In the text, an example was given of a lay educator in the Philippines who could not change her school’s status to university because of lack of a priest to head the endeavor. We wish to clarify that the school now has the priest and change in status. The example was offered as an illustration of the issues that arise as a result of the shortage
of priests, which was the topic of a workshop discussion.
Part Two of the B-E-NET (Bene- dictine Educators Network) story will be in the July issue.