Einsiedeln - Prayer, in Benedictine life, does not stand at the margins of the day as a “religious time” among other times: it holds the house from within, shapes relationships, and measures the truth of what is done. Those who enter a monastery soon discover that oration is not an addition to common life, but its temperature. It is the place where the person is stripped of defenses, re-educated to listening, and led back to a freedom greater than the sum of personal projects.
This primacy arises from an anthropological and theological realism. Prayer lays bare the risk that accompanies every vocation: turning the journey into an anxious search for “self-fulfillment,” defending one’s image, demanding that God confirm what has already been decided. The monastery, instead, asks that life be handed over, and that this handing over take shape as a daily apprenticeship of interiority: vigilance of the heart, struggle against what fragments, availability to be guided. In the Benedictine tradition, this school has a concrete name: obedience. It is not a disciplinary mechanism, but a spiritual posture that opens the ear. Listening - the true listening of which Benedicthimself speaks - shifts attention from one’s own thoughts and feelings toward the Lord and toward those who, within the community, are called to guide us. When this happens, space opens for the “inner person”: not as a metaphor, but as real, slow, verifiable growth.
Prayer, then, has a communal face and a personal face that seek one another. Communal, because the monastery is not a collection of devout monads: it is a communion in which each supports the other, and in which fidelity does not depend solely on individual energy. Personal, because no one can pray “by delegation”: choral liturgy and the rhythms of the house become fruitful when they encounter an interior decision, when the person accepts being converted precisely where resistance lies. In this horizon, prayer is not reduced to the recitation of formulas. It is listening, adoration, praise, supplication, offering; it is the attempt to make the whole existence an oriented act. For this reason, contemplative life is described as an essential ministry: apparently “useless” in terms of efficiency, decisive in terms of fruitfulness. Tradition goes so far as to say that praying resembles breathing: just as breath is unnoticed while it is there, so prayer sustains a unified life without imposing itself as spectacle.
This point is particularly irritating for a culture that measures everything in terms of visible results. Benedictine prayerteaches that not everything that counts can be counted, and that fruitfulness does not coincide with performance. Cloistered life - hidden, “umbra,” withdrawn from the lights - guards a paradoxical truth: gratuitousness generates. Not because it produces immediately measurable effects, but because it places existence within a circuit of love that does not close in on itself. The person who gives without reserve becomes, mysteriously, mother and father in the Spirit: bearing the weight of others without possessing them, interceding without controlling, accompanying without invading. Here one understands why monastic tradition speaks of the “maternity” of the Church and, in particular, of the spiritual maternity of contemplative life. This is not a poetic definition: it indicates a real responsibility. In prayer, the monk does not keep the world outside the walls; it is brought inside in a different form: not under the category of anxiety, but under that of intercession. One prays with a heart that allows itself to be wounded, yet without dispersing; with a compassion that does not become curiosity; with a participation that does not slide into protagonism. This style requires guidance, and the monastery has always known it. Mature prayer does not arise from the self-management of the soul. It requires accompaniment capable of verifying, healing, preventing: a spiritual fatherhood and motherhood that neither flatters nor humiliates, but forms. Tradition describes the guide as physician and shepherd: someone who sees wounds and dangers, recognizes subtle temptations, and prevents illusion from being mistaken for fervor or discouragement from becoming destiny. For this reason, the relationship with the abbot and with those who accompany is not an organizational accessory: it is part of the pedagogy of prayer.
The condition for this relationship to be healthy is demanding: humility and faith. Humility, because the person accepts not being the measure of oneself; faith, because one believes that God acts also through human mediations. When this trust cracks, prayer risks becoming spiritual narcissism: the pleasure of narrating oneself, of gazing at oneself, of always starting over without ever truly entering the work of conversion. This is not a marginal problem: it is a temptation that can take on “religious” forms, turning interiority into a stage. Tradition insists on a chastity of the spirit: sobriety, essentiality, interior silence. Yet it is not enough to denounce risks; one must also name the typical deviations of those who seek guidance. Two, in particular, are identified by the masters of the spiritual life: idolatry and murmuring. Idolatry turns the spiritual father into an absolute, delegates, infantilizes, and places authority in the place of God. Murmuring does the opposite: it erodes trust, interprets everything through suspicion, and defends itself with permanent criticism. Both, in different ways, break prayer, because they render it incapable of listening: either because it listens only to a divinized human voice, or because it listens to no one anymore.
The Benedictine way calls for a more sober posture: recognizing that the one who guides remains a man, and precisely for this reason can be a gift; not seeking a spiritual signature on one’s projects; not continually changing interlocutors to avoid obedience “to the end.” Prayer, in this sense, is also an exercise in truth: it leads the person to the point where bargaining stops and self-giving begins. We live in a time in which ecclesial life is often measured by agendas, projects, and results; the Benedictine tradition calls the whole Church to place at the center a priority: prayer as criterion. In the monastery, one does not “produce” spirituality; one guards a daily obedience that passes through psalms, silence, work, listening. It is here that less impulsive decisions and less performative words mature, because discernment is born from a heart that has learned to stand before God. This also has precise consequences beyond the abbey walls: those who pray faithfully learn limit, renounce control, and reject the logic of image and efficiency as the ultimate tribunal. For this reason, monastic prayer remains a lesson for the world: it restores it to its measure, frees it from the anxiety of “having to succeed,” and hands everything back to grace. And it reminds the Church that the first act of governance, before every reform and every initiative, is adoration.
fr. L. P.
Silere non possum