Communio Calling
Communio Calling
Reclaiming Scholastica
Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.
Special guest Carmel Posa, lecturer, author and Good Samaritan Sister, shares her wisdom and insights on St Scholastica in the lead-up to the release of her new book due in 2024, ‘The Lost Dialogue of Gregory the Great: The Life of Scholastica’.
In this conversation with host Gabrielle Sinclair, Carmel walks us through the process of shaping this new hagiography of the life of Scholastica. Many people have asked "Why don't we know more about Scholastica?"; Carmel answers this question and more as she walks with and reclaims the voice of Scholastica.
Welcome to Good Samaritan Education's podcast, Caminio Calling. My name's Gabrielle Sinclair and I'll be your host. Imagine discovering a lost dialogue of Gregory the Great that tells the story of Scholastica, the twin of Saint Benedict. Imagine then how, with her own agency, she came to share and shape through dialogue with her brother the place of love in this way of life he was forming for his community as a foundation for seeking God. Well, that's exactly the project Good Samaritan Carmel Poser has been shaping and nurturing for the past few years. Join me as I talk with Carmel today about this exciting, creative, and somewhat daunting task of breathing new life into Scholastica of Norcher. But first, a little bit about Carmel. Carmel Poser is a sister of the Good Samaritan who is currently on staff at Yara Theological Union, teaching in the Department of Christian Thought and History. She also teaches units at St. John's School of Theology at Collegeville, Minnesota, in the area of monastic studies. Carmel began her own theological studies at Flinders University before then completing her master's at St. John's College, Collegeville, where she majored in monastic studies. She then completed her doctoral studies with Melbourne College of Divinity. The title of Carmel's doctoral thesis was Neither More Than a Christian nor more than a woman. The Theology and Spirituality of the Body in the Writings of Eloise of the Paraclete. Now I first read Carmel's article in Jarunga about her work on Scholastica, I immediately knew I needed to share it with you. Feminine voices being so important to our charism and tradition, there is such a thirst to hear more about scholastica. So here we go. Let's jump in because Carmel has a wealth of riches to share with us. And we are going to share story today, as we always do on Communio Calling. But first, we are going to start with sharing a bit of story and digging into that incarnational reality of who we are and where story takes us. First, Carmel, I'm going to ask you to embark on a bit of your own story and share some of where you've come from and the influences you've had growing up. What are the things that have formed you in your path to this place today? And perhaps we can hear about your first encounter with the Good Sams. But let's start at the beginning. Where was home? Thank you, Gabrielle, for having me on your little podcast to start with.
SPEAKER_02It's a pleasure to talk to you. Well, I was born in the West, in Western Australia, in a place called, of all places, Subiaco, but I grew up in Adelaide. We shifted to Adelaide when I was very young. So I really call Adelaide home, although my roots are Western Australia. My dad always said, once a Western Australian, always a Western Australian. So I'm a Docker's supporter. Yes. I've got two older sisters and a younger brother. My father was both a league umpire in the football and a politician and a convert to Catholicism. So I grew up in a rather exciting household because it was always about religion, football, and politics. Yes, indeed. And if there wasn't an argument around the dinner table, well, you're expected to start one. And that flows on to life in family still. We still love having an argument. So being in an atmosphere where there's no argument, I like I find a little uncomfortable. So I'm lucky I'm in a university setting. So my mother, she just died just recently at 94, very gently taken off to God, and we were grateful for that. But she was really the powerhouse of the family, even though Dad was so high profile. And Dad always said, you know, from that wonderful BBC show, Mum was she who must be obeyed, and she was. So she was a fairly powerful woman in the family. And so women have always been a powerful force in my life. And any need for an overt feminist stance came as a bit of a shock to me later on in my life because it was the way we grew up, really, in one sense. I can relate to that. Yeah. And I lived on the same street as the Good Samaritans, Good Samaritan sisters. So their convent was down one end and we were down the other. So I grew up knowing them in Adelaide, knew them very well, and was educated from primary school and through my secondary school by Good Sam. So they were strong women. And so they were a strong influence on me as well. So women's stories were surrounding me. Again, I went to uni and did a science degree. I was the only girl in my chemistry lab. It struck me as odd that I'd be treated differently. Again, that's I think where it all started because I thought, no, I'm not going to put up with this. So I had a good time at uni, really, and made good friends there. So that's how that all happened. And then I decided I wanted to do something interesting with my life. I was always a bit, I'm always fighting my mother because I wanted to be a hippie, and she was a fine dressmaker, and we were all to be, you know, finely dressed. And I'd often get the comment, no, you can't go out looking like that. And so, you know, there's this latent hippie in me. And I think partly the urge to find something deeper in my life was that, you know, hippie urge, you know, something different than everybody else was doing. And so I remember joining a prayer group and thought that would fill the hole that I felt. And one of the Good Samaritans joined the prayer group too. And I asked her if she'd like a ride home one night. And that was the end of the story. 34 years later, here I am. May I ask which good Sam that was? It was Margaret Shields. She died a while back. She was a wonderful woman and really helped me along my journey, really gently. She didn't push. So I'm very grateful to her, really.
SPEAKER_01Do you remember a time growing up where your faith became your own as opposed to something the family did together?
SPEAKER_02When did it become my own? I think I grew up in a fairly strong Catholic family. Mum was very pious. Dad was a convert, you know, so it's the full bit. You know, people would say right wing. I would call him a moderate, but he was, you know, right wing. We used to argue about all sorts of things. And that's what I liked about Dad was that you could argue with him. So he wasn't that strident that his way was the highway. You know, it was all about rational thinking. And I suppose in my teenage years, that rebel part of you that wants to be different, but having a mother and father who allowed you to argue, I think that's how it became mine.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_02You were wrestling with it from an early age because you were having that dialogue. Yes. Always having. And it wasn't a sharp moment. It was really a thinking, a reasoning towards it. All I think I'm still reasoning it. Like I don't think there's anything permanently grounded for me. I'm always discovering. That's actually my work anyway. So there are no answers. There's just discovery continually. That's a beautiful thing. It is. Yes. It's about breathing and I love it.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. Well, let's move on then. Thank you for sharing that beautiful evolution of your story. So I love hearing about the learning and the scholarship that's happening about rediscovering and uncovering women's voices and roles through history, but particularly through our Christian history. And for those of us with a feminine Benedictine worldview, Scholastica, the sister of Benedict, is obviously somewhere we would like to see further exploration. Though Scholastica has been your recent focus in your studies, she wasn't the first. Could you tell us a little bit about the wonderful woman that you first discovered in the work of your thesis? Maybe just a bit of highlights about her.
SPEAKER_02Eloise, a great friend of mine, 12th century abbess. And I was lucky enough to be asked to go and study at St. John's Collegville, Minnesota, to do my master's there by the order. And that's where I really discovered her in letter writing. We were doing monastic women through history. And I found her in her letters. And I think probably what I liked her again was that rational bent. You know, I always want to know why. I don't just want to know, I want to know why. And Eloise was in her letters, was always questioning her dialogue partner, which was Abelard, who was her husband and then her abbot and her brother in religious life. A complex relationship there. Yes. And father of her child. So, you know, like a fascinating story to start with. The teacher I had treated her more like a hysteric than anything. And I just didn't read it that way. Because she spent most of her life as a very famous in her own time, very famous abbess, highly regarded for her intellect and her holiness. And yet she comes down to us in history, written by men, of course, as the lover of Abelard, that one of the greatest philosophical minds and theological minds of the 12th century. Again, it's a bit like Scholastica Rilla. I just thought there had to be more to her than that. And so being able to research her and find her voice, uncover her voice in the letters, and then to discover that there are other letters, earlier letters, that are really between a teacher and his student. And so their thinking processes were coming out in those letters, not simply, well, not their relationship, but also that she's one of the women who first wrote a full-blown commentary on the rule of Benedict and also stimulated Abelard to answer her scriptural questions, which I found really fascinating. Bit like, you know, Paula from the early church with Jerome. So there was all that material that hadn't really been unpacked both theologically and from a spiritual point of view. And so I made that my task to do that and befriend her while I did it.
SPEAKER_01Oh well, she became one of my friends through you as well.
SPEAKER_02Yes, yes. Yeah, it's wonderful. You have to send me that. I did all right in that essay.
SPEAKER_01Well, back to Scholastica now. Thank you for sharing about Eloise. I want to go in deeper with her at some point, but I have not yet had the chance. But first Scholastica, some of our listeners will know a lot or a little. So let's kind of shape her story. What does history or tradition say about scholastica in the first place? What do we know?
SPEAKER_02Nothing. Virtually very, very little. So we don't really have much other than what Gregory tells us. And even that, some scholars have said, is sort of like a literary trope rather than a reality. And yet, you know, she was recognised very, very early on in history. We do have some early prayers to her, we have some liturgical material, we have some very, very short lives, but they're really just a repeat of the two stories that Gregory tells in his life of Benedict with not much else.
SPEAKER_01Can you explain to our listeners that might not understand hagiography what the dialogues represent? Like what is that literary form?
SPEAKER_02Gregory wrote the story of Benedict in a very typical form of his era called hagiography. So hagiography is just the combination of two Greek words, a Greek and Latin word, hagio meaning saint, and graphy meaning writing. So it's the writing of a saint's life, but very different from the way we would write in the modern era, a saint's life. Not really concerned with facts. We seem to think facts are what it's all about, but they were really concerned with truth. There's a distinct difference between how one tells the truth and how one tells fact. Truth far more exciting, really. And then it's also the way they go about that. So if you're writing about a saint, the truth of a saint is that they lived the life of Christ. So therefore the saint's life has to imitate Christ. So they're not writing it for, you know, the psychological value behind the biography of a person or the historical value of a sequence of a person's life that a novel would be or a biography be written that way today. They're writing to show the reader that this person was the image of Christ in their lives so that it's like an inspiration to us when we read it, so that we live that life as well. So that's the focus of it. And therefore, hagiography is often just littered with biblical references. You think, oh, but that's just the Bible. Yes, well, that of course it is, because that's what a saint's life would be. It would also have a something of writer within it, because the writer has their own agenda. Today we would call that interfering in the story, but in hagiography, that was expected. So Gregory had agendas. Gregory was a bit depressed when he sat down to write the life of Benedict because life was pretty tough in Rome in those days, and he wanted to inspire not only himself but others around him. So he wrote many dialogues, not just the one with Benedict, but other saints as well, he wrote about. And that was to inspire people and to lift his own spirits to show that God was still operative in this world that seemed to be falling apart around them. So he would put in some of his agenda. There was heretical movements around at his time. So therefore, Benedict, it looks like he's anti those heretical movements, just like Gregory was. So that was typical for you to put your agenda into the story. Um, there's lots of other little techniques that hagiographers include as well that I'm going to tell you about in the introduction to the book. Yeah, wonderful.
SPEAKER_01Well, tell us more about the elements of story that scholastic represent in the dialogues.
SPEAKER_02Right. So in the dialogue, really, most of the women in Gregory's dialogues, whether it be the second dialogue, which is the life of Benedict, or the two either side that are sandwiching it, and the last one, they're mostly there to prop up the men in their holiness by being, you know, temptresses or occasions for the men to show us their miraculous powers or their saintliness. So they often don't have agency of their own. And even Scholastica, who's got, you know, a sizable chunk at the end of the story, is put there. She looks like she's put there to show us that Benedict still had something to learn right at the pinnacle of his life. He had love to learn about. And she goes to heaven before him as well. So there is some sense, but she's still there, not with her own agency. It's for Benedict. So that's what I was trying to uncover. Well, hold on a minute. How does this woman come to be somebody who can show Benedict the fullness of a life in faith? Right at the end of his very holy life. It's a woman. I mean, there's a woman at the beginning, his nurse, there's a woman at the end. And now this woman at the end is the one who's showing him what loving God is really all about. And it's not adhering to law, you know, because Benedict's outside his monastery and disobeying the law. It's actually about love. So love comes before law, and it's a woman who teaches him that. So my question was, well, how did she become like that? How did she become like that? And I don't believe she's simply a trope. I think she was a woman of history. People can argue with me, but there's no way we can prove she wasn't. And because she was so venerated so very early on, that at least tells you something of the reality of her or the belief in the reality of her. Which yeah.
SPEAKER_01It's often said that she started the feminine Benedictine order. Is that tradition speaking?
SPEAKER_02As tradition speaking, and I'm going to pick that up in my book, but I'm going to do it in a different way, not as something separate, but something as integral to the rule of Benedict, which is going to make some people feel uncomfortable, and others people think, oh wow. And uh, you know, like I'm not the first to suggest that scholastica had something to do with Benedict's writing of the rule, but I'm blowing it out of the water to show how she may have had a lot to do with the way that Benedict shaped the rule. We know from Terence Cardong, you know, and again it was even before Terence, the whole idea of the rule being written over time, and that Benedict learnt over time what it was to deal with human beings in community, and therefore we notice through the rule that there are changes in his attitude towards the rigorousness of rule. And so the last chapters, Terence Cardong says we really need to read the rule backwards to see how Benedict matured. Well, I'm going to position Scholastica so that she's key to that maturing. I think I've done it in a way that's credible, using hagiography as a tool to do that.
SPEAKER_01Let's step back a minute. So I became interested, well, alerted to the fact that you're writing this book through your article in the Australian Benedictine Review. And the title you use in that article is Reversing the Gender Border. And what's that idea of border kind of between how does that phenomenon kind of help you or was alerting you to the way that we needed to readdress Scholastica?
SPEAKER_02I've actually been writing it before then. It's obvious from the article. There's so much there. My colleagues here at YTU, two of them, wanted to put in a submission, a group submission to the Leeds International Medieval Conference. They wanted to give papers. You do it as a group, you put in a three-group, and their theme of the Leeds Conference, the year, I think it was last year, the year before, was on borders. So the three of us got together and thought, now can we do something? And they really urged me on with my writing for it. And so I thought, well, how can I get a theme of borders into scholastica? And it wasn't hard at all. Because in Gregory, there's this thing where the men are up front and there's a gap when you deal with the women, and they're sort of on the border of the story, they're on the boundary of the story rather than centre stage in the story. So this happens so often because we've sadly either lost the writings of women through the vagaries of history, or the women weren't able to read and write and write their own stories. We've lost those stories. And so, you know, placing because we've got something of Scholastica and clearly something of her genius through her greater love of God, how to shift that boundary or border, if you like, so that she is the central character rather than Benedict. Without, I mean, I didn't want to dispose of Benedict at all. I wanted to make her a credible inclusion in the hagiographical record so that she has the agency rather than the sideline, the border issue of the characters in the story. And because Gregory had himself said, even this one line, she got what she wanted because she had the greater love of God. Then there were so many questions that arise in you as to, well, how did she get the greater love? You know, where did she come from? And what was her journey to there? Not his, but what was her journey to there? And did it have anything? You know, what did they talk about that night? Have we ever thought about what a brother and sister may have discussed when they'd got to that point of their lives? And were there further conversations they had that got them there? And how did she get to Monte Cassino anyway? So all those questions started to arise in me, and I felt they needed answering. And so I sat with the questions and thought, well, where did she come from, first of all? Tradition, not Gregory, but tradition decided they were twins. And they probably weren't, we don't know. But because tradition said it, I thought, well, I'll pick up the tradition and make them twins. And I'll even make their birth happen in such a way, as you read in the Sharunga article, that she becomes center stage for a change. She's the first one born, you know, a bit of a trope from the Old Testament of Esau and Jacob, she comes out first, holding on to him though. That's the sort of thing I went right back to there. You know, where where did it come from?
SPEAKER_01That's I what I'm really curious about, like breathing life into the story. Is that the part of the process? It's borrowing and looking back at all of the different ways of doing. Because I imagine that with all of our modern sensibilities, they could creep into like how you approach it. So how do you kind of wrestle with that?
SPEAKER_02Well, I I let them creep in now and again. So excellent. Called it the lost dialogue of Gregory the Great. So, you know, it's a pretense. I'm putting everything on the lips of Gregory. And so I've got to be careful because there are things that Gregory wouldn't say, but there are also things that Carmel would say, and I'm the writer. And just like there are things that Benedict wouldn't say that Gregory puts on the Lips of all hagiographers do that. There's an agenda behind it. So I allow myself to interrupt. So Gregory probably wouldn't have said some of the things in the introduction that I've written that you don't have about the equality of men and women from the Genesis story. It's clear that it's a Good Samaritan writing the story, Good Samaritan sister Benedictine writing the story because the Good Samaritan story is clearly, you know, right in the middle of the story. The progress of scholastica is about a life of prayer and mission. So it's very much a Good Samaritan. I wanted her right from the beginning. I wanted her to be a Good Samaritan story because my primary audience is my own sisters, and I wanted it to be clear to them that that's who she is. She's one of us, and yet she's bigger than us at the same time. I also didn't want to be a hagiographer that simply impressed the reader with spectacle because my readership's very different from Gregory's now. So I didn't have too many miracles. There are some, but not too many. And I wanted to insert our understanding of interpreting the gospel for life a little bit more. So I'm allowed to do that as a hagiographer, is to put Gregory. I also use a lot of Gregory's own words with research materials and the way that he would say things. So that is there. And there is in the life of Benedict, Gregory breaks into little soliloquies about various issues. I have him do the same thing, but I have him do it with a little bit of my agenda popping in. So I want him to talk about hospitality because it's so central to us. So I want him to talk about women, I want him to talk about all sorts of things. And some of the time I draw directly from Gregory's own writing. Some of the time I put words on his mouth, some of the time I paraphrase him. So that's the work of a hagiographer. And that's why I find it a great method to use for today in recovering a woman.
SPEAKER_01It must be really gratifying because it's such a creative process as well.
SPEAKER_02Oh yeah. Wonderful fun, really. Absolutely. You know, when I started it, I didn't know where to start, you know, what to do. And so little stories start popping into your mind, like, you know, the wounded goth was an obvious one that came to mind fairly quickly. Well, I'll start with that. Well, why isn't there a birth narrative, you know, and how can I shape that? And what biblical tropes, you know, what biblical precedents can I put into it? And in my study, I've also studied lots of hagiographical stories. And the other method in hagiography is we'd call it plagiarism today, but it, you know, in the ancient times it wasn't. You borrow from earlier stories. If you notice when the book comes out, the footnotes, they're fairly intense. They draw on previous hagiographies, the life of Macrina and some earlier ones. And then she also becomes, I wanted her to become the precedent for later hagiographical stories that some of us know. So anybody who's read any stories will know, oh, there's Leoba, there's Bridget of Kildare, there's Radagunda, famous French saint. So you would recognize where I'm grabbing the stories from. And just as Benedict becomes the model for later hagiographical stories, now Scholastica can be the model for later hagiographical stories.
SPEAKER_01So it's really filling in the gap, is what I'm doing in. And what would your advice be to someone that wants to know more about Scholastica? Look up her life story on the internet and you can get this, you know, factual-looking kind of description. What would be your advice for someone to approaching this for the first time?
SPEAKER_02Well, I think you go to the two stories in Gregory's dialogue. That's where you'd start, because that's really where it starts. Um, and there really isn't anything else. Any of the other things that you find are written into the tradition. We don't really know who her parents were. We know they were landed nobility, probably. A tradition gives us their names, so we can find a medieval text about that. And that's going to be in the back of the book in the appendix. There's a couple that I've got translated well that'll go in the back. There are liturgical texts from early Middle Ages on or sermons. It's interesting when you read any of those, they're really just repeating the thunderstorm story. So a lot of them are doing that. So, in terms of advice, I'd say a disciplined imagination. Paula Gooder, who many people would know, who's a New Testament scholar from England, she's written the life of Phoebe and another one, the life of Lydia. It's a little different. She's not really doing a hagiography, but she's not doing a novel either. What she's really giving you is Pauline theology in the story of women and how they were part of it all. So she's doing the same thing. She's using a very disciplined historical imagination. You know, like I'm not saying my story is a factual, you know, nobody's suggesting it's factual. I am suggesting it's true. It rings true, particularly for women, I hope. It rings true for what we think a woman's saint would be like, and it rings true for what women, I think, today understand themselves as in terms of the gospel, in following the gospel and what the gospel call is really all about. And that's very different from what Gregory in one sense. It's the same as what Gregory was writing, but it's got a slightly different flavour to it. Because I haven't emphasized the spectacle, because she is a strong woman, she does take the lead, and she stands up to. I have another story in it where she stands up to the soldiers who are in their way. And she does it with an integrity and a sense of herself that I think we want to hear in women's saints, rather than she's not domesticated in any sense. And many of the saints in the historical record are very domesticated in their saintliness. So yeah, that's what I'm trying to do.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, and often my feeling based on nothing except knowledge of women is that it's been rewritten, or those women have come from the writings of men rather than the potential reality that they held, because they were obviously held in such a way that they were recorded, but it was still a man that was writing it and potentially, as you say, with their own intentions placed upon that.
SPEAKER_02So um it's one of the biggest influences on me was really the studying of the life of Rudagunda, uh sixth century saint from France. And her life was written by both a man and there was another one written by a woman in the same era. And what struck me in studying it was the difference in the way the man wrote about Rudagunda and then the way the woman wrote about her. And that's always struck me as fascinating. And women write differently. Women's bodies, I did that in Eloise, have a different position. And I think they are more aware of it than history has told us they were. So they shape a language, they're struggling to shape a language. All our language is really from a male world, and so struggling to find a language that is our own continues to be our task. That's why I think recovering the voices of women through a method that is ancient but can be new and is within the whole tradition, it's a wonderful tool. And it is being used, and so like Paula Gooder and myself and others are using that to you know bring forward the voices and the bodies of women and giving them agency in a world that took it off them.
SPEAKER_01Because we're shaped by our own experience and bringing that into the start to bring some kind of equalization to the language in which we are immersed in, as you say, those bodies and experiences being recognized. Because language is shaped by the male gaze, as it were, or the male intention. So many experiences of women don't get legitimized. And so even modern women can think, oh, well, that's not important because it's never been seen as important or recorded as like what what am I to say something about that? It's not just a rewriting a history, it's actually elevating now and the realities of today, too. I actually wanted to hark back to something you were saying, and I think we talk about living in a post-truth world at the moment. So when we say something is true rather than fact, I think some modern ears just go, hang on, the this dissonance there that they don't quite know how to handle.
SPEAKER_02Because we think we're so modern, but we're really still living in an enlightenment. I know, you know, five, six hundred years ago, a philosophical framework where empirical data was everything. And yet there's so much more in terms of you know what we see, what we experience in terms of truth than mere fact. I was just at my mother's funeral and my sister gave the eulogy, and it was wonderful. And when we sat down and talked about life with mum, it suddenly hit me, gosh, we remember differently. We all remember differently. And you know, what's the fact? It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter.
SPEAKER_01I know. My husband and I need to get better at understanding the facts not important because we argue about the detail and really it doesn't matter.
SPEAKER_02That's right. And you know what? What's the truth behind it? The truth behind all the stories we told were not the fact, but the truth that, you know, mum was steeped in what she believed in. Uh, she was steeped in goodness. She believed in not saying bad things about people. You know, whether she did or not, in fact, wasn't the point. You know, this is her life was shaped by that. And so truth goes much deeper. And you know, fact is important. It's freed us in a lot of ways, but we can lose track of what's true. There's the truth of people falling in love, and yet the fact of it's a complete conundrum. Learning is more than fact, it's this whole process of not just rationality, but of experience, of consciousness. That incarnational reality that we don't fully comprehend. No, no, and consciousness is you know very much an individual thing, but also a communal consciousness that we can have as well. And I just find that so much more fascinating. I teach mysticism, and so therefore, this whole understanding of a god, it's not about facts, it's about grappling with paradox and mystery and inethability. And that doesn't leave you nowhere, it leaves you absolutely everywhere and opens up a book that's massive. I could have written, I could have written a tome on Scholastica. She kept talking to me, she kept telling me things.
SPEAKER_01Well, that was going to be my next question with the many hours that you have spent with her. What was she telling you? What was the hope or the things that she revealed and new to you?
SPEAKER_02Yes, it was really interesting because I had to get her to Monte Cassino. You know, what happened to leave? Why did you leave home? And on the way down, did you visit your brother? And she said, Okay, you use your imagination. I did leave home. And don't forget, my brother, on the way. And you know, there'll be things that happen on the way. What do you think might happen on the way? So she got me there in the end. And she'd even say, now stop here, stop here. What might happen here? What value do you want me? What value do you imagine me to have? And my driving force was the rule. The hagiography gives you all sorts of tools. So I had to have scripture. It had to be infused with scripture. That was okay. But then it really hit me. She had something to do with this rule. And she said, Yes, yes, yes. Because I start with the dialogue partner, Peter, saying to Gregory, you know, like I want to know what they talked about the night of the thunderstorm. And Gregory says, No, I can't tell you that. First of all, you'll have to know about her. And then I'll tell you what they spoke about on the last night. So we start with that's how the movement started. Because that was my question. What did they talk about? So I can't know what they talk about unless I take the journey. And so the rule was the journey for me. So where did the rule come from? How did it become the rule that it is? How did Benedict get that wisdom? And because she loved more at the end of the story, so that's in the story of Gregory, she had to have something to do with it. So I looked for the love in the rule to guide me along the path. And so that's what I think I'm hoping people will find when they read it. The path of scripture, the path of the rule, the path of other hagiographical stories, and a little dash of Carmel's agenda.
SPEAKER_01Well, I can't wait to read it. I was lucky enough to be on Benedictine pilgrimage with other colleagues from Good Samaritan Education earlier in the year and some sisters as well. And there was this reoccurring conversation that was happening off and on throughout the whole pilgrimage. It's where is Galastica? I want to know more about her. And I'll go, well, we only have these tidbits. So I'm so excited that we will have this new lens to look through and to and that it will take us deeper in the rule too, that it it continues that journey for all of us as well, but in with a new voice to to guide.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, I think some people be will be delighted. I think some people think, Mmm, she's stretched out a bit. I'm sure you'll get plenty of feedback. I've even had feedback from the Chirunga article. But Michael Casey's written the preface for me to the book and he he seems okay about it. So that's uh a bit of a tick of approval already. That's a good start.
SPEAKER_01Well, I mean, it's going to be published. You've got the tick of approval from not just um not just a few.
SPEAKER_02So I'm very excited about Lip Press taking it on, liturgical press taking it on. So I'm very grateful to them in supporting me. It all started at St. John's anyway. When I was on sabbatical, I had to have a project. Uh so I started it there, and it's nice that it's going to finish there. So that's good.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. So I have one last question for you. So I I ask all our guests that come on Communio Calling, what is your favorite? Or and it might be your favorite today, it might be your favorite of all time. Quote from the rule and why?
SPEAKER_02It would be a lot of people's favorite. I think it's that, you know, not giving the weak something to run from and giving the strong something to strive for. And I think it's my favorite because that's what I experience as a good Samaritan sister in the order, this extraordinary support when I need it, and this extraordinary challenge and encouragement when I need it, sometimes when I want to back off. So, you know, this giving the weak nothing to run from and the strong something to strive for, you know, what a way to form community. What a way to live together, you know, human beings made in the image and likeness of God with Christ as our saviour. I could not think of a more apt line from the rule, really, that encapsulates it for me. But then, like when I think about it, there's so much more, you know, like you start at the beginning. Yeah, chapter 72 is, you know, everything as well. But I think that line does say a lot about what I've experienced personally in community in the Good Samaritans.
SPEAKER_01It's amazing sometimes when you just pick one line from the rule. And sometimes when you just dig a bit deeper in it, it actually encapsulates the whole rule. Yes, yes. When you go to write something about the rule, you want to write everything.
SPEAKER_03Yes.
SPEAKER_01Well, it has been an absolute delight to share this conversation with you today, Carmel. And I cannot wait to read more about Scholastica. And thank you for taking us on the journey.
SPEAKER_02Thank you, Gabrielle. It's been a pleasure to talk to you about it. And I hope you all enjoy it when it finally does come out. And do we have a final title yet?
SPEAKER_01Well, it's called The Lost Dialogue of Gregory the Great, The Life of Scholastica. And we'll be waiting and scouring those catalogues as they come.
SPEAKER_00All right. Thank you very much. Thank you and have a wonderful day.
SPEAKER_01I really hope you enjoyed that conversation with Carmel as much as I did, complete with a bit of hagiography 101, not only putting into context Carmel's new work, but also helping us clarify what we know and hold true about the life of Saint Benedict. We will definitely be following the publication of Carmel's new work and sharing the details with the community as it comes available. But perhaps if this has sparked your interest and while you wait for Carmel's new book, why not take up a copy of Terence Cardong's Translation and Commentary of The Life of Saint Benedict by Gregory the Great? I wish for you many happy hours of reading ahead. But for now, as you continue through your day, may the transforming table of hospitality be wide, inspiring you with mercy and compassion to go and do likewise.
