It sort of started the weekend after the Sept. 11 disasters. Like a lot I was searching for answers. I had returned to Catholicism 5 years previously after a 22 year absence but thought my spiritual growth had hit a plateau.
There is a local abbey nearby, part of the Solesmes congregation, so still using Gregorian chant daily. I was drawn to it. During the most reverential Mass I realized that this order was 1500 years old and had seen much worse than Sept. 11 but survived. So I started to study them more. I was very drawn to the gentle and balanced nature of their spirituality.
As it turned out a fellow flying club member was an oblate, and I asked him about it. It seemed very attractive to me so I asked to meet the Oblate Director. I joined the noviciate for oblates the following February and became an Oblate on Pentecost Sunday 2003.
What I like about the order: their spirituality is very balanced; the Rule of St. Benedict is easily adaptable, and in spite of first reading (where it looks harsh) one finds in St. Benedict a very human touch, a very touching understanding of human frailty.
It helped me re-develop a prayer life that had sort of hit a dead end. I also like structure in my life. My username here is the Benedictine motto: Ora et Labora (Prayer and Work). I work from home so structure is particularly important to maintaining discipline (both for work and family… the lines get blurred), so the Divine Office places important marker points in my day: Vigils to mark the beginning of the new day, Lauds to make the transition from rest to work, Mid-day prayer to signal the mid-day meal and rest break, Vespers which is the dividing line between work and family time, and Compline to ease me into the night.
I am also, by personality, not one given to brash displays of piety, but also I am given to meditation/contemplation/solitude/silence. As an Oblate I try to foster balance between all of these. Benedictines are not a “silent” order, but they are an order that venerates silence. So for a busy family/professional man, it allows me to create silent spaces without ignoring my family and work.
Benedictines evangelize very quietly, trying to live by example rather than shout the Gospels from the rooftops. That also suits my personality.
It is an order that fosters a healthy balance between prayer, work, and recreation, moderation in drink and food, and a path for conversatio morum, or one’s own conversion.
Beyond that it’s hard to answer… it’s an order I find enormously attractive, and I have developed deep personal relationships with several of the monks in our abbey, a real feeling of familial ties which is important to me; other than my wife and children, I have no family left, all of my elders are deceased.
To become an oblate one asks the Oblate Director of the abbey one wishes to attach to. You will be in a 1-year “noviciate” where you will study the Rule of St. Benedict and discern if this is your calling. You then make a solemn promise before the abbot, or someone acting as a proxy for him (it can be your parish priest if you are too far away), that is in fact the same verse of Ps. 118(119) used when monks make their profession. But it is a promise, not a profession. In your promise you sign a charter in which you agree to stability, conversion of morals, and to incorporate the Rule to the extent your life allows.
See
osb.org/obl/index.html
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