Benedictines in Norwich

Awaken with a Rule!  The St Benedict Week Conference at Norwich organised by the Lay Community of St Benedict

This year’s St Benedict Week organized by the Lay Community of St Benedict brought a number of us to Norwich for a rich and encouraging gathering around the theme, “Awaken with a Rule of Life”. More than eighty people, lay and religious, attached to various Benedictine communities and none, came together to reflect on the enduring gift of St Benedict.

I was glad to contribute a talk on “Awakening the Benedictine heart”, alongside Abbot Javier Aparicio Suárez, the Abbot President of the St Ottilien Congregation. It was a privilege to reflect on how a Benedictine heart is formed and continually renewed: through listening, prayer, community, joy and suffering, and the steady, realistic wisdom of the Rule. Awakening is not a single moment but a daily invitation. St Benedict gives us the powerful image of an expanded heart: expanding as we run upon the path of Christ. Perhaps the deepest meaning of a Benedictine heart is one that not just embraces a given situation, but one that expands to embrace all things.

The morning’s reflections were enriched by the moving contributions of Abbess Anne Clarke of Malling Abbey and Abbess Anna Brennan of Stanbrook Abbey. Speaking from their own distinct traditions and experience (one as computer programmer, the other as a police officer), they offered personal, thoughtful testimonies of spiritual awakening. Their conversation gave the gathering both depth and a welcome human warmth.

Norwich itself was a wonderful setting. Its cathedral, with values consciously shaped by its Benedictine past, gave the whole occasion a strong sense of place. To meet there, listening to the city’s long Christian memory as well as to one another, was a reminder that the Benedictine tradition is not a relic but a living inheritance.

A visit to the Sainsbury Centre’s exhibition on the Rule of St Benedict at the University of East Anglia was one of the particular highlights. Set within the wider exhibition, What is the Meaning of Life?, it brought monastic objects, contemporary art and passages from the Rule into a striking conversation. It made visible the way Benedict’s ancient text still addresses very current questions: how we order our lives, attend to one another, and seek what is truly life-giving. 

I also found time to make a pilgrimage to the shrine of Julian of Norwich. Her witness to God’s love and her serene confidence in divine goodness made a fitting companion to the week’s theme of awakening. It was a quiet but profound moment in a visit full of conversation, learning and friendship.

St Benedict Week left me grateful: for the generosity of the speakers and organisers, for the openness of those who attended, and for the continuing power of a Rule of Life to help us become more awake to God, to one another and to the world around us.