The Year that is Beginning (Prologue 1)
PROLOGUE OF OUR MOST HOLY FATHER SAINT BENEDICT TO HIS RULE
1 Jan. 2 May. 1 Sept
Hearken, O my son, to the precepts of thy Master, and incline the ear of thine heart; willingly receive and faithfully fulfil the admonition of thy loving Father, that thou mayest return by the labour of obedience to Him from Whom thou hadst departed through the sloth of disobedience. To thee, therefore, my words are now addressed, whoever thou art that, renouncing thine own will, dost take up the strong and bright weapons of obedience, in order to fight for the Lord Christ, our true king. In the first place, whatever good work thou beginnest to do, beg of Him with most earnest prayer to perfect; that He Who hath now vouchsafed to count us in the number of His children may not at any time be grieved by our evil deeds. For we must always so serve Him with the good things He hath given us, that not only may He never, as an angry father, disinherit his children, but may never, as a dreadful Lord, incensed by our sins, deliver us to everlasting punishment, as most wicked servants who would not follow Him to glory.
1 January 2026
Prologue vv. 1-7
God has granted us another year to journey towards our heavenly country. Desiring to begin anew our life in Christ, renouncing impiety and the desires of this age, as Saint Paul urges us in today’s Epistle, we naturally turn once again to the Holy Rule which is for us, in the words of Bossuet, ‘a mysterious abridgment of the Gospel.’
Father Abbot has directed our attention to the many valuable historical studies on the Holy Rule which have been undertaken in recent decades. Amongst these is the work of Sister Aquinata Böckmann of the Benedictine Missionary Sisters of Tutzing, Germany. In her Perspectives on the Rule of Saint Benedict, she examines in particular the opening and closing sections of the Prologue. She notes the particular importance of the opening and closing sections of any work, and points out the relation that exists between the beginning of the Prologue and the final words of the Holy Rule in Chapter 73. (read text)
Furthermore, she notes that the opening verses of the Prologue, which we just heard, are not found in the Rule of the Master, which was the likely source for much of Saint Benedict’s work. They rather reproduce rather closely an admonition taken from ‘the Rule of our holy father Basil’. (read text) Saint Benedict thus seems to be have been inspired by this great Eastern Father to begin his Rule, written as it is for communities of cenobites, with a direct appeal to the heart of each monk or would-be monk.
This, then, is how we begin the year: with an invitation to listen with our heart to the words of our Father and Master, ‘the listening that changes life’, known as obedience. This certainly includes obedience to our Abbot and those whom he commissions to act on his behalf; it also means listening to the Holy Rule itself, to which the Abbot too is subject. But even the Holy Rule is, for Saint Benedict, only a means to direct us to listen to the voice of God speaking to us in the Scriptures. And all of these external words are at the service of the internal word, addressed by the Divine Teacher to the soul.
Will we, then, listen in the year that is beginning? Are we ready to let the word of God, spoken to us in so many ways, change our way of looking at ourselves and at others, so as to change our hearts from selfishness and the sloth of disobedience to obedience and self-sacrificing love in imitation of Christ? Do we want to be converted so as to follow Him to glory?
It may seem too demanding, or hopeless for us who have begun so many times only to fall again. But the Liturgy presents us today with the Immaculate Mother of God as our intercessor. Let us ask her to obtain for us the grace to incline the ear of our heart today to all of the challenging things that God will say to us in the year ahead, and in the drawing we are about to do to send us the Saint who can best help us along the next stage of the journey.
