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Communio Calling
Communio Calling
A Benedictine Worldview for Today
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In this episode, Judith Sutera OSB joins Gabrielle Sinclair to explore how the Benedictine tradition offers a grounded, inclusive, and deeply human lens for understanding who we are and how we live together. In this enriching conversation, Sr Judith shares her own Benedictine journey and highlights the importance of articulating faith and tradition with care and intention.
Judith is a member of Mount St. Scholastica monastery in Atchison, Kansas, is a retreat leader, counsellor, and one of the first women to earn a master’s in monastic theology. She recently completed a tour in Australia where she ran, alongside Elizabeth Carrillo OSB, a series of retreats and workshops across three states, focusing on the connection between Benedictine spirituality and eco-spirituality.
Welcome to Good Samaritan Education's podcast, Caminio Calling. My name's Gabrielle Sinclair, and I'll be your host. It's a lovely treat today for me to bring you a conversation with Judith Satira. I interviewed Judith on her recent visit to Australia. We stole away to a quiet spot in the Spirituality Centre at Kincumba, as the silent retreat she had been directing alongside Elizabeth Corello was drawing to a close. Being a silent retreat, I'd been doing a lot of listening to Judith and Elizabeth, but it was lovely to have this conversation. I hope you enjoy its twists and turns. Judith is a member of the Benedictine Monastery of Mount St. Scholastica in Acheson, Kansas. She's one of the first women to receive a master's degree in monastic theology. She has combined this education with previous degrees in counselling and become a popular writer and presenter for retreats and conferences, bringing Benedictine wisdom to oblates, academics, and religious groups. Well Judith, it is wonderful to have you here. Welcome, welcome to Australia. Wonderful to have you on our Good Samaritan Education podcast. Communio calling is very much about being grounded in story, understanding how past, present, future collide in our interconnectedness and the stories that shape us and how we express the diversity of who we are. So on that note, would you mind sharing with us some of your story, your influences, how you got to where you are now, and perhaps your first experience of the Benedictine life?
SPEAKER_00So my parents were immigrants from Sicily, and I grew up in a fair-sized city in a very diverse neighborhood with a lot of different kinds of people. My first experience with nuns was not very positive. I have an attention deficit problem and I was just always the one getting some kind of discipline. So when I finished grade school, the last thing I wanted to do was go to a Catholic high school. But my parents insisted, and since they only had an eighth-grade education themselves, education, of course, with many immigrants is very, very important. So I was enrolled in a Benedictine high school, and I found the nuns there to be very different from the ones I had had in grade school. I think without being able to name it at the time, that whole sense of hospitality of being able to deal with diversity, neurodiversity, and all kinds of ethnic diversity, they just seemed to have a much different sense of honoring the student. And so I still wasn't the best student. So at the end of high school, they arranged for me to get a scholarship to their Benedictine College in Asheson, Kansas, in the middle of nowhere. And I like to say it was their final attempt to save me from myself. So I went off to Hot Cop Mount St. Scholastica College, and I guess I never left. So I spent four years there, and I saw the sisters in very human ways and their beautiful liturgies and their beautiful spaces, and as much as I didn't think that was the life for me, it was something about the way they lived. It was simply the witness of who they were. Now in the college we teach Benedictine spirituality and we talk about the pillars of Benedictine education and all those things. At the time it was simply just something I picked up. Who are these people and what are they doing and why are they doing it? Yeah. So I went to grad school, but I kept feeling called back. I then had some relationships with some of the sisters, had read the rule, thought it was weird, as most teenagers do. Indeed. And then I just launched off from there. I was blessed to be able to work in the maintenance department during the novitiate. They had the sense to put me outside where I could run around and do a lot of very physically active things while other people in the novitiate were sacristants and bedmakers and that sort of thing. So again, they just kind of were able to handle me where I was. Then I went on about my life. I had gotten a master's degree in counseling before I came.
SPEAKER_01What drew you to the counseling?
SPEAKER_00I don't know. I was just always kind of fascinated by the human mind. Yeah. You know, as I say, I'd known such a diversity of people and such a diversity of the way we treat different people that I think it was just always interesting to me.
SPEAKER_01For someone that was not much of a scholar, having a master's degree before you even got there, that's fairly scholarly.
SPEAKER_00Well, I could do it. It was the discipline more than the intellect. Sure. I didn't have to work very hard to do well. I was blessed with that. So I learned a lot more about the people parts, and that interested me more than academics. So yeah, then I started doing various kinds of social service jobs and eventually was working in a diocesan office that advocated for the elderly. I had quite a background of politics with experience with campaigns and protests and you name it before I came. So I ended up as a lobbyist in the state capitol for a few years. But I was still working on the grounds in the maintenance department in the summer times.
SPEAKER_01So for those listeners that won't really know, can you tell us a little bit about the community there? And about the different ministries. You're obviously mentioning some of them already, but the different ministries of the community that you're part of.
SPEAKER_00So the Benedictine Sisters of Mount St. Scholastica still are very large by Benedictine standards, but at that time we were 400. You know, of course, Benedictine life is based on prayer and community, and what you do for a living is secondary. But we had for a long time, as most women's communities, we were a teaching community by and large. So we had other kinds of ministries that were peripheral to that, but most of the sisters were teachers. We had a number of grade schools and high schools in the area. And Benedictine College, which was Mount St. Scholastic at the time before it merged, we had the girls and the monks had the boys, St. Benedict's College, and then it merged to Benedictine College. And Donnelly College, which is a two-year associate degree. They do offer some bachelor's degrees now, but at the time it was just associate degrees. Primarily for people in the inner city of Kansas City who are first-generation college opportunities. Majority of the students are minorities, and it's just specifically was set up before there were all of these community colleges. It was set up by the diocese and the sisters specifically to offer educational opportunities to those who would otherwise wouldn't have it. And of course, our star graduate is Wangari Mathai. She graduated from the mount and went on to become the founder of the Greenbelt Movement in Kenya and won the Nobel Peace Prize. Proud of her, but we have a lot of other really great grads too. And then we moved into other ministries as many people did in the Vatican II period and after. We're still one of the largest Benedictine monasteries in the country. We're at about 85 people right now. And we're blessed to, I think, still have a very good future ahead of us. That's wonderful to hear.
SPEAKER_01Now stepping back into your story a bit, can you tell me a bit about your family and where do you fit in the family? Have you got siblings?
SPEAKER_00Oh, I have half siblings that are older. My father was widowed and then he married my mother later in life. Uh-huh. And so it's kind of an interesting family dynamic, too, because my brothers and sisters were all adults when I was born. So they're just a typical, very, very large, very, very loud Sicilian family.
SPEAKER_01Do you remember a time when faith became your own rather than just something that you inherited from family?
SPEAKER_00I don't know if I got that much faith from my family.
SPEAKER_01Oh, where did faith come from?
SPEAKER_00We went to the Catholic schools and all that, but we weren't super devoted. We went to church on Sunday and the stations of the cross and Lent and that sort of thing. But we never like prayed as a family or had a lot of religious conversations at home ever. So the spark of faith came where? It just came from a sense that it was there. Yeah. I think it was just more that, you know, in times when a lot of other things didn't make sense, it was the one thing that made sense was God being there. So more of that kind of an experience.
SPEAKER_01How beautiful. Well, thank you for sharing your story. So our Good Samaritan education community is built on the three pillars of the parable of the Good Samaritan, the lives of the sisters and the example of the sisters, and the rule of Benedict. And we're having new students and new people coming in and out of our community all the time, students, staff, governance people. And we're often beginning again and teaching who we are and what we are. As a teacher and experiencing that as well, where do you start when you start with people afresh with the rule?
SPEAKER_00Well, I had to come to a real appreciation of the rule myself through what I saw lived, you know, so it was more like these little snippets of maybe a quote on a poster on the wall or whatever. But mostly it was the example of the people. And I mentioned that I had been a lobbyist, and at some point I was always interested in history. And I picked up a book of Benedictine history in a secondhand bookstore when I was in grad school, before I really knew what I was looking at. And it didn't make much sense. I mean, here's all these people who've done this for 1500 years based on this great spirituality, and when you pick it up, there's not a lot of overt spirituality. It's more, you know, who's gonna say which prayers. Yeah. So I'm not sure people can really approach the rule as a piece of literature and get much out of it that extends to the spirituality. It almost has to, I don't know, maybe it has to work both ways at once or something. So when we teach Benedictine spirituality, the students are given the rule, but they're not given the rule without this sense of this is one guy's experience, and he wasn't writing something for the whole world.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_00So then we have to extrapolate from that. What is it that makes it work? There's no time in history when people don't need a model of prayer and community. And so if people see this and then they can say, you know, what is it these people have? Why is this different? So many of the students will say, I just felt so welcome when I came. You know, or the space was lovely, and I saw a reverence for the grounds and a reverence for the people, or the prayers were there, the liturgy was there, and they sampled it and got something from it.
SPEAKER_01That's often the conversation I have when I do induction with new staff. It's like, what was your first experience? What did you encounter when you first arrived? What was the right aspects that touched you or that you noticed? And it's all of those things. It's the hospitality, it's the care for the individuals. And they don't know how to name it necessarily yet, but there's a sense of sacredness of the place. And through ultra and ritual, they're starting to unpack. They don't even know it yet. They're starting to unpack the rule and all that it's built on.
SPEAKER_00Exactly. Because the rule itself doesn't really tell you a lot about how this works, but the people who do it and the workings in their lives, I think, is what attracts people.
SPEAKER_01So, what advice would you give then to someone coming into a Benedictine community a fresh as a teacher or someone that's perhaps coming into a governance role? What would you say would be the key things to pay attention to?
SPEAKER_00You know, there's lots of good books out there for lay people, just simple books that condense the spirituality. And I think condensing the spirituality is a lot more helpful to the newcomer than reading the rule out of context. Absolutely. So I think it's more you have to start with people's writings that accent hospitality, humility, whatever, you know, the basic values, and then you can kind of move into the text of the rule itself.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. And the context of the text is invaluable, understanding that, you know, 1500 years ago it has all of those layers to unpack as well. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00And that it's a rule for beginners, he says. It's just do these things and it will seep into your bones and you'll begin to understand why you do what you do and how it makes for harmonious life. And then to realize that you're always beginning. Always beginning. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01So many of our listeners, when they think about the rule, think about or visualise a little red book of the 1980 RB. And some of our listeners also be familiar with your new translation. That's an inclusive translation. You can get it in a standalone and also with commentary. Could you share with our listeners why now? Why translation now and how did you approach it?
SPEAKER_00Well, I think the inclusive translation has been a long time coming. RB80 was good for its time, but 1980 is almost 50 years ago. And I don't think we think about how long ago that really was in terms of the way the world has turned since then. There were a couple of adapted versions that had like choose your term in parentheses. So it was say, say he slash she or abbot slash abbot slash prior slash, you know. And then you had to change whatever gendered language there was around that. So there was a lot of people adapting on the fly and often not doing a very good job of it. The rule itself is pretty straightforward, and we have to remember that he wrote it for a small group of men, and you can be a purist and say, well, if he wrote it for men, then we should read it for men. But in a women's community, there's a lot of tension around that, and the fact that frequently we are reading in the presence of retreatants, oblates, various visitors, in which case at our house it's almost always male and female. And so if you start changing it, just change all of the abbots to she's that doesn't speak to them either. So it was really long past time. Somebody just had to do it. And with the commentary, the whole idea was exactly what you said. If people don't understand that this was written many, many years ago. So my intention with the translation was not so much the translation as what's this got to do with life today? So the first paragraph, it's very simple, the first paragraph is explaining it in a historical context. No, we don't beat children. No, we don't sleep with knives, but explaining where he's coming from. And then the second paragraph is always, how can this speak to us today? That's really all there was to it. And I'm no Latin scholar, I have to say, I did not do very much with nuancing. I simply changed the gendered language to be more comfortable for reading because most of his Latin is pretty straightforward.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. I think one of the other things that's really clear in your commentary and that's is a surprise to some people that haven't delved into the rule is the rule of the master. Some people are just not familiar with that that there was another text that Benedict was working with, and it's not wholly his own original work. Can you explain a little bit of that to our listeners?
SPEAKER_00Sure. The rule of the master dates from probably about a generation before Benedict and probably somewhere else in Italy. We don't know where he got it, how he got it, who was using it. I have some theories, but I don't know enough to delve into the linguistics and all that. But basically, it's based on the rule of the master. So I always tell the students, the students are familiar with a website called Turnitin.com where they have to turn in their paper and then scours the internet and comes back and says how much of this was plagiarized. Almost the whole rule is plagiarized. What he doesn't get from the master, he gets from other ancient sources. He doesn't originate anything, he's a synthesizer. Because there's already 200 years of monastic history before him. But he's the one who pulls all of the ancient tradition together. And so he starts with the rule of the master, and then the only way we can really understand Benedict and his personality is by reading the two side by side. Because so little of it is original, we can only know him by what he changed. And that's the tricky part because a lot of what he uses from the master is coming from a man. The master is pretty suspicious. Yeah. And pretty much about, you know, people are not very capable themselves, and so this leader has to be the one who does everything for them and thinks for them and doesn't trust them and all of that. He's definitely a glass half-empty kind of guy. He's a glass half-empty kind of guy. Yeah, I used the example in retreats of one of the novices once, when we were reading the chapter on hospitality side by side, she said, you get the impression that when you leave in the morning after being a guest there, that Benedict is packing you a lunch and the master is counting the silverware. And I think that's, you know, that's really it. And so we learn about Benedict by learning what of the master he simply couldn't accept as it was. So there's many, many years of scholarship around the question of which came first. And there's actually still an open question. Since there are so many similarities and so many distinct differences, is there perhaps a third unknown text? You know, when we talk about the gospel and we talk about Matthew and Luke borrowing from the same sources, is there a Q document that's never been found? Were they both copying from somebody else but putting their own spin on it? And I imagine that'll stay an unanswered question. Some of the parts of Benedict that really aren't as comfortable are just taken straight from the master, and so he hasn't nuanced the language very much. But it's interesting. I would recommend anybody who wants to know more about Benedict and spirituality needs to put them side by side.
SPEAKER_01It's a tough task, but I think it's worthwhile for those that want to dig deeper. And my understanding is that Benedict's voice, the beginning and the end, is more his own.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, the prologue actually is partially based on the master's prologue. Scholars think that it was adapted. The rule of the master has a long piece that seems to be adapted from a sermon for catechumens at the time of baptism. So there's plenty of stuff to still be explored and studied and compared. Absolutely.
SPEAKER_01After hearing you speak this week, I'd love for you to tell the listeners some of the things in the rule which I now know I am going to develop better understanding on that I've kind of disregarded before about, you know, all of the middle section where it's just all the things about life, but hearing you talk about there's something in there. Can you maybe give some examples of some of the things that people might just completely disregard in the rule that have something to tell us?
SPEAKER_00Sure. All of the middle section is really about how people serve each other to make the monastery function like a well-oiled machine. And so we can leave it at that and say, well, you know, he's just explaining how to do things. But the idea is that whenever we do things, we should be processing how to do them better, how to do them in a more loving way. I use the example of a child at a very young age can be taught to pick up trash or put things in the recycling bin or whatever, and they don't have to understand the whole interconnectedness of the web of creation and the environmental crisis before they start doing the action. At the same time, you don't wait until you understand all of this to start doing the action. So most of what's happening in the rule is he is saying, okay, we're living together. What does that mean? How do we become a body and not just a bunch of moving parts? And the whole learning to serve as Jesus serves, learning to live with different kinds of personalities in peace. I always say there's not a lot of overt asceticism in the rule. He doesn't have them starving or you know walking barefoot in the snow or you get half a bottle of wine each nut. Yeah, right. They they live a pretty good middle class life for their time. But living with other human beings is all the asceticism we need. That's for sure. You know, because they're always rubbing against us and they're always telling us things about ourselves that we maybe don't want to know. Or we're always dealing with our own impatience or our own whatever our particular challenges personality-wise and spiritually are. And so you simply learn by living in the rule.
SPEAKER_01One of the things that particularly struck me when you were talking yesterday was about the whole reconciliation and excommunication. I've skipped over those chapters many a time before. It's not something in there, but hearing some of those things yesterday about living together and the process of understanding each other better, and it's really almost a step-by-step guide for accompaniment in some respects.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, first of all, we have to know we have a problem. So the first part of the section he talks about how a person should be warned privately. You know, sometimes we can do pretty humiliating things or insulting things rather than dealing with the problems privately and respectfully. And then he identifies also the different kinds of things that disrupt community. If the person is stubborn or disobeys orders or prideful, you know, there's this very specific list of things that disrupt the harmony of a group of people. And so at that point, sometimes we just have to have a timeout. Yeah, there's the tough love kind of requirement. Yeah, yeah. So we have to recognize that there's a problem, and sometimes we need help to recognize that there's a problem. But he doesn't leave the person just alone in the dark to feel bad. One of the things that he adds that's distinctive apart from the rule of the master is what he calls the senpecte, these people who go to comfort the person. He's never about leaving anybody just feeling bad. There's always something when he talks about with the tools, he says, never despair of God's mercy. Just prefer nothing to Christ. Various places in the rule, the adaptability. If this isn't working at your house, then change the times of day, you know, or you don't try to do certain things at certain times if there's a better way to do it. He's always about the adaptability. And you can't take the rule literally. So when he's talking about these functions of living together, some of it may seem kind of throw off to us, but even the part of excommunication, first thing he's doing is recognizing that sometimes things go wrong. You know, it's the fact that that section's there at all says he's not some rose-colored glasses kind of guy. Well, he's had attempts on his life before. Right. So yeah, he's been there. So then the senpecte are the people who comfort, but they comfort with, as you say, tough love. They say, yeah, there there was a problem. What are we gonna do about it? Rather than denying that there was a problem. Sometimes we have to be senpecte to ourselves as well. Absolutely. And so these people are people who help us get ready to move to the next stage. And then he has these rituals. I think rituals are really important. You know, I can feel sorry about something, but it's a whole other step to actually apologize, to actually confront the other whom I might have hurt. And then to find a conclusion in that. And then to find a conclusion, yeah. At the end of this ritual, the abbot says, enough.
unknownYeah.
SPEAKER_00And that's when we enter into that new form of the relationship where the past is past. We probably don't forget, but we have to try to forgive. And the assumption that this person wants to be better, and the ability to let that person be different now and not hold on to the old images. So, yeah, that's those chapters really can help us understand failure in our lives.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, a new learning for me is that there's definitely a lot to teach us in that space. So, as our communities in our space are starting to become more diverse, we have a beautiful statement of Good and Samaritan Education that is all about being schools of welcome. So, all are welcome in our schools, and we can no longer kind of assume knowledge of the cradle Catholic, even necessarily a Christian understanding or worldview. And so, faith, tradition, and culture has to become a dialogue in a new way. So we have to be attentive and intentional about how we talk about these things. So I wonder if you would describe or make an attempt at describing what a Catholic worldview is, nuanced by the Benedictine life.
SPEAKER_00You know, the Catholic worldview has to be the worldview of Jesus. I mean, all Christians claim to be followers of Jesus, but we pick different parts that we like or don't like. You know, the some fundamentalist Christians are all about, you know, there's only salvation through belonging to this particular church. And there's some sisters who serve in a part in the deep rural Appalachia, and most of their neighbors are one or another variety of evangelical Baptists that they were helping after some terrible floods, and one of the men they were working with said, You're such good women. It's a shame you're going to hell. And so we can end up with such a narrow view of salvation, even though we have a strong sense of what the church teaches Christian life to be. Sometimes we forget that there are other people living good lives too, and we become kind of caught in that rigid form.
SPEAKER_01Sometimes it's very comfortable to be living in black and white. We have to catch ourselves out every now and again.
SPEAKER_00One of the things that I do at the college is speak in the world religion classes. I have been part of the monastic interreligious dialogue. The church's teachings about non-Christian religions are probably more open-minded than most people think. Everybody's engaged in this search for goodness and holiness and truth, and everybody has the potential for it. Well, some of these students, when they read these documents, are just shocked. As the professor says it never occurred to them that we needed to talk to anybody. And when I talk about the interreligious dialogue, and I've been privileged to participate in some worldwide kind of conversations with Buddhists, you know, someone always puts up their hand and says, Well, when do you start telling them about Jesus? And I say, That's above my pay grade. I'm there to learn from them and them learn from me about the things we hold in common. So if you think about it, we do not have a different word for a Buddhist monk than a Christian monk. We don't have a different word for a Hindu nun and a Christian nun. What we practice is a lifestyle that's common to those religions. And in fact, Christian monasticism was influenced by early contact with Buddhists and Hindus. And so we do the same things they do, we just do them for a very different reason. So we do them based on the belief in a personal God and the recognition of single soul with a personality in the sense, whereas the Buddhists, you know, think about being absorbed into the wholeness and the stream. But when you look at what we do every day, we're all about modeling a world that's different. We chant, we read the sacred scriptures, we live in community, we hold all things in common, we share, we take care of the poor, we live simply. You know, all of those things are exactly the same. It's just the theology behind it that's different. And we try to make it clear to the students that the theology is very different. We're not just like Buddhists. Lifestyle is something that's common to more than one faith tradition.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. Sometimes when people get embedded in an incarnational worldview, they see the similarities and think it's the same. But there's lots to be similar, which is a gift. But the sacramentality is slightly different in our worldview. Holding things equally sacred but also different.
SPEAKER_00And so we have a language that recognizes that monastic is something broader than just the Catholic faith, but that it's one expression of a monastic way. And that's very confusing for people.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, well, thank you for that. Every year, Good Samaritan Education we highlight a theme that is drawn from Benedictine values. This year's theme is stewardship through the lens of conversatio and justice. So in this year of Jubilee, we're fanning the flame of hope and also heeding the 10th anniversary of Lodato C. What wisdom do you think these values hold for our time?
SPEAKER_00First of all, I think we broaden our understanding of conversatio, that the word is really based on conversation, not conversion. Tell me more. Well, we translated it sometimes with to conversion of morals. The term conversatio has to do with turning over and over. So back to the fundamentalists, you know, I went to a some kind of a revival meeting once and they were singing about their conversion experience. You know, who was saved on a Monday and who was saved on a decoration. Yeah, a one-off event. And I think we can sometimes get lost in that. And conversatio has to do with a constant back and forth. It's not a one-and-done. The word has to do with taking up a way of life and moving along that way. So conversatio is an expectation that we change every day, that we get better, that we get closer. We're not going to someday feel like we've achieved justice.
SPEAKER_01No.
SPEAKER_00There's a fidelity to that way of life. But the fidelity leads us to ask ourselves more and more about the justice of what we're doing, and the justice of what our governments are doing, and the justice of how people treat one another. And so conversatio, I think, is a good word for that because we're constantly changing, turning, exchanging on a regular basis.
SPEAKER_01And in the context of stewardship, then we are on this learning journey with LaDato C. Not the first thing that has highlighted our need for our common home to be more engaged with how we are engaging with the gift of creation that we've been given. But that we also sometimes limit our idea of stewardship, and so having it paired with Conversation is actually helping us turn that over and actually re-examine the justice element of it, but our our fidelity to it as well.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, we're going to have to continually be in change that brings our stewardship more in line with values that we have to get pursue more. You know, it's all steps in a journey. We have no idea all of what it's going to entail in the next five years, ten years, or next week in some cases, as the world is in constant movement, then we have to be in constant movement to keep up with what changes we need to make in our lives in order to be more responsible stewards.
SPEAKER_01I think we've come to a point in the crisis that just recycling or just doing a little bit in your own personal day, as important as that is, there has to be more to what we're doing. We have to be building a community that's actually moving forward rather than getting in our own way.
SPEAKER_00We just have to keep being willing to think differently about what the next right thing is. I always say that the Benedict's rule is all these little everyday things are really like how do I just do the next right thing? Thank you.
SPEAKER_01Well, thank you for sharing your story and some of your learnings of your lifetime with us today, and particularly about the rule. I have one last question that I always ask all my guests for the podcast, so it's without notice. I ask, what is your favorite quote from the Rule of Benedict? Or it might be one that's with you today, it might be your favorite of all time, and why?
SPEAKER_00As I've said so many times in the retreat I've just given, I heard a wise person once say, if the rule stopped after the first word listen, that would be enough of a prescription for a lifetime. So I think if we are listening people, that will lead us to do the next right thing because we'll be attentive to the needs of the world, the needs of ourselves, and the needs of the people around us. Mindfulness. We just have to pay attention, and there's plenty there. So listen. Listen is enough. Thank you very much. Thanks, Judith.
SPEAKER_01There really is a lot to digest there for newcomers to the rule and for those more familiar. I do highly recommend you getting your hands on a copy of Judith's translation, particularly with the commentary, as it gives you a chance to digest some of those more quirky bits with a bit of help and provides an opportunity for reflection throughout the entire rule. But as you continue along your way of this life and in faith, may your day provide hospitality that is wide, that you may embark on a stewardship of embrace, and that you may not pass by on the other side, but go and do likewise.
