For St. Benedict the essential trait of the monastic life, one that includes all the others, is "seeking God." The novice's vocation is to be evaluated on this criterion (Ch. 58); each monk's conversatio is expected to be epitomized in these words. The book of Proverbs, our first reading for today's liturgy, instructs us, then, to seek wisdom "like silver and search for it as for hidden treasures."
The traditional exercises of the monastic life, and of the Christian life, clearly provide a context and a structure for this quest, for seeking God and searching for wisdom. Public and private prayer, lectio divina, the practice of obedience and humility, the instruments of good works, the daily labor, the care of guests and the sick, the good zeal embraced in community - all of these direct us on the way to God and instill in us the assurance that this search will be successful.
There is clearly in this kind of seeking God a perspective that is broader and much more nuanced than a simple "God-and-me" point of view. Seeking God in the Benedictine mode of living involves community as it necessarily must. God is sought on a range of levels which extend to the heavens and are rooted in the here and now. Indeed, one writer directs us to begin the search for God with a terrestrial perspective. She writes: "First you must honor the sacred you see in other people, and [then] you will begin to appreciate the divine."[1] She alludes then to the principles of Buddhism which invite one to "practice compassion for all living things. Always try to speak accurately and truthfully with contemplation. Then you will know that nirvana exists."
The encounter with God, sought directly and embedded in others, also leads those who seek to a fruitful discovery of self. Rabbi Abraham Heschel has described the search in this way: "To be human is to be involved, to act and react, to wonder and respond.... To think of God is not to find Him as an object... but to find ourselves in him."[2] Seeking God means finding God in others. It means finding ourselves in God. Thus, we are once more returned to the human condition where God continues the work of creation, constantly fashioning a people in the image and likeness of God.
And so we suddenly realize, in the words of a German writer, if I may attempt a translation of his simple couplet:
We do not seek you, nor come into your sight,
It is you who seek and find us, Eternal Light.[3]
Seeking God is a voyage of discovery and being discovered that is all-embracing.
[1] Karen Armstrong, The History of God, 1993, quoted in Minneapolis Star Tribune, February 14, 1998.
[2] Quoted in Minneapolis Star Tribune, January 10, 1998.
[3] Albrecht Goes, quoted in Abt Dr. Odilio Lechner, Advent-Weinachten, St. Ottilien: EOS Verlag, 1988, p. 19: Wir suchen Dich nicht, Wir finden Dich nicht, Du suchst und Du findest uns, ewiges Licht.
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