Today's chapter of the Rule is so moderate, so modest in its assumptions, so measured in its prescriptions. One can understand why those who have never tried to live according to its guidance can dismiss it as being "easy". Substitute something else for wine and it may become more challenging. Try applying Benedict's advice to your use of the internet or your ipod (or your golf clubs or your gun) and you'll see at once that the thoughtful moderation he recommends is a bit more demanding than at first appears.

I must have spent half an hour yesterday thinking about a subject for this week's podcast and actually recorded two, but they have been consigned to the digital rubbish bin for lack of inspiration. It isn't often that any of us admits to lacking inspiration. Lack of money to complete a project, maybe, but lack of inspiration? Scarcely ever. As regards our own inner world, how many of us are really modest about about what goes on in the space between our ears? A trip through the blogosphere reveals many a posting that might usefully have been trashed before being sent into cyberspace. Part of the problem is that we have become so accustomed to pouring out — our thoughts, opinions, prejudices — that we have forgotten that the root of the word inspiration has to do with taking in, is, in Christian terms, a work of the Holy Spirit breathing into us. This week we might try to allow the Spirit a little more room in our lives. When truly inspired we can ourselves become inspiring.

Today's entrance antiphon calls upon us to rejoice with the angels in celebrating a feast in honour of all the saints who did battle under the Rule of St Benedict and together praise the Son of God. People sometimes smile at the way in which we Benedictines humbly acknowledge the countless thousands who have attained holiness through fidelity to the Rule of St Benedict, but that antiphon should put an end to any tendency to smugness. Fidelity isn't something we can take for granted. The opening prayer of the Mass reminds us that we must pray for the grace of perseverance. Perseverance doesn't sound very heroic, does it? Far better surely to pray for something a bit more spectacular, something more obviously difficult? I think you know that true fidelity, true perseverance, can demand huge things of both individuals and communities. For a Benedictine, today's feast is a reminder that we depend utterly upon God. Let us be glad and rejoice that here at Hendred we can daily experience the truth of that. Take as a thought to accompany you through the day the words of the Preface which, as so often, express the theology of the feast, and pray especially for our oblates, associates, friends and benefactors that they may unite with us in praising the Son of God.

Preface of the Day

Truly it is right and just, our duty and our salvation,
always and everywhere to give you thanks,
Lord, holy Father, almighty and eternal God,
through Christ our Lord.

You raised up the holy abbot Benedict,
as a teacher of the steps of humility
by which a countless number of his sons and daughters
have reached the love which drives out all fear.

Preferring nothing to the love of Christ,
they recognized Christ in the sick and in the stranger,
in the poor and in the pilgrim.

Praising you seven times by day, and even in the night,
they placed all their hope in you,
and taught us never to despair of your mercy.

Even today, their lives distill a holy wisdom,
inflame us with longing for life everlasting,
and inspire us to sing your praise
in the joy of the Holy Spirit.

Therefore, in the sight of the angels,
with heart and mind in harmony with our voices,
we exalt your glory forever,
as we ceaselessly proclaim: holy, holy, holy . . .

St Martin has a special place in the affections of all Benedictines because he was the first bishop in the west to live a monastic life. Everyone knows the story of the soldier-saint sharing his cloak with a beggar. It would have been so much easier simply to give the whole cloak; but to share, to make oneself look slightly ridiculous in order to spare the feelings of another, shows real delicacy and generosity of spirit. It is one of the ironies of history that today, as we commemorate St Martin, we also recall the Armistice which ninety years ago ended the fighting of World War I. Few, I think, could claim that it ended the war. Wars are ended with peace treaties, and there are few who would dispute that the seeds of World War II were sown in the humilating terms eventually imposed on Germany. Today I shall think of St Martin and his readiness to serve; I shall also think of the World War I battlefields — of Verdun, perhaps, and the terrible waste of lives produced by eight months of shelling (60,000,000shells!). If we do not learn the lessons of history, we shall surely be obliged to repeat them.

The feast of the Dedication of the Lateran yesterday was overshadowed, to all intents and purposes, by Remembrance Sunday, but the feast of St Leo the Great today turns our eyes towards Rome again. Doctrinally, liturgically and politically, his pontificate (440–461) was extremely important. Probably most of us think of him in connection with the Chalcedonian definition of the two natures in the Person of Christ, human and divine, or his arguments in defence of the primacy of Rome. Every Christmas we re-read his writings on the Incarnation which are models of clarity and theological insight (the two do not always go together). This morning, however, I was thinking about his success in turning back Attila the Hun from the very gates of Rome. A man who understood that jaw-jaw is always better than war-war, St Leo is a saint for our times. (No podcasts until the current round of coughs and splutters in community is over.)