Almighty and everlasting God, your precepts are the wisdom of a loving Father: Give us grace, following the teaching and example of your servant Benedict, to walk with loving and willing hearts in the school of the Lord's service; let your ears be open to our prayers; and prosper with your blessing the work of our hands; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever.
Amen.
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The Marks of Greatness
Feast of St. Benedict, July 11
Great people speak to ages after them like sound waves in the universe. Their voices glide across the ages of time, their words ringing on, the echoes of their lives rebounding in our own.
But it is sometimes difficult to recognize the great when first they come because there are few who are really ready for them. Few see the new world before them as clearly as they do. The Roman philosopher Boethius wrote, "Every age that is dying is a new age coming to life." The problem is that most people stay rooted in the age before them where the path is clear, the way is sure and the work is stable. The great people of every age are those who step over from one age to the next to show us that we must step over too.
Greatness is that quality, like literary preeminence, that is impossible to define with scientific precision but almost equally impossible to mistake once you see it. It is a shocking thing, greatness, because it brings to the world around it a radiance of spirit, a clarity of purpose and courage of heart masked at first by the trappings of the ordinary. It feels, in fact, so stock that once you witness it you take it for granted. It oozes out of a great-souled person in rare but commonplace fashion and in that way draws everything in its orbit into the stuff of greatness too. "The great," Sydney Smith wrote, "hallow a whole people and lift up all who live in their time."
Greatness has four sure marks: freedom from the barnacles of the self, compassion for others whatever the desires of the self, commitment to something greater than the self and the life-giving courage that is willing to sacrifice the self for the sake of that freedom of spirit, tenderness of heart and vision of soul.
Benedict of Nursia was one of the great ones.
--Sr. Joan Chittister
shared by Gretchen Chateau