Are We Listening to Babel or Jerusalem?

"Humanity, created by God in all its grandeur, is today facing a pivotal choice: either to construct a new Tower of Babel or to build the city in which God and humanity dwell together." - Pope Leo

To cross the threshold of the monastery, you must walk over a single Latin word engraved on the stone floor: SILENTIUM. For Benedict, the silence of the monk, if it is true, flows from and for communion. Silence is the condition of the heart filled with God's Presence. From the first word of his Rule for monks (Obsculta), Benedict invites us to listen in silence, attending to the Word of our faithful and loving Father. In silence we pray with Mary, treasuring the Word, who is Christ, in our hearts. For this reason, we have a period of house silence dedicated to lectio divina (praying with the Bible) each morning and evening, we gather before Mass and meals in silence, and after the day's final hour of prayer (Compline), we observe Grand Silence, broken only after the following morning's lectio period. 

The monk should "cultivate silence at all times" (RB 42:1), because we are before the Lord at all times. The true position before reality is what recognizes its substance, and this is Christ, its Lord, in whom all things subsist, and to whom all things are destined. The Rule is governed by the eschatological vision cast by Christ's presence, such that even the humble tools used to bake, till, clean, etc., are to be treated with reverence, "as sacred vessels of the altar" (RB 31:10). The work of the monk, whether mowing, teaching, baking, or praying, is the work of offering up everything to be consecrated and transfigured in Christ: "First of all, every time you begin a good work, you must pray to him most earnestly to bring it to perfection" (Prologue 4). 

We can see from this that Benedict gives his Rule to build a place- the monastery and the heart of each monk- to be, in the opening words of Pope Leo's first encyclical, a "city in which God and humanity dwell together." Yet, to build prudently, we must admit the impact felt of the many forces within and without that mitigate against this union of God and man. For one, you bring yourself into the monastery, so expect, Benedict tells us, a personal fight to allow Christ to conquer one's own rebelliousness and self-centered willfulness- in the old word, one's sinfulness: "This message of mine is for you, then, if you are ready to give up your own will, once and for all, and armed with the strong and noble weapons of obedience to do battle for the true King, Christ the Lord" (Prologue 3). This is where the real adventure of life begins- surrendering to Him who is our peace.

Benedict also recognizes forces without, which make the walls of the cloister necessary. The cloister exists to free the monk to hear and follow the voice that calls him by name to the freedom of His name. After Benedict's Prologue, we read, "Here begins the text of the Rule. It is called a rule because it regulates the lives of those who obey it." We might ask ourselves, what is my life being regulated by? What does my life obey, in fact? Does it support or erode the silence of the heart that recognizes the presence of the One who saves? Benedict's measure by which all tools, attitudes, and practices are to be compared is precisely this: Does this help me recognize Christ's Presence, or does it obscure Him? In other words, in this do I recognize the substance of life and reality is Him, or do I forget and fixate on a false substitute, my own images and shadows? The Rule is for the monk's happiness. We are made for the real, not for the fake, and in the light of Christ, reality becomes illuminated in its true form: as a gift given by the Father to be returned, transformed in gratitude.

Yet, man's capacity to live in and love the real is not, we might say, in the best shape these days. Increasingly, what is actually regulating our lives, what we are actually listening to, and what is actually inhabiting our silence (or making it near impossible to find) is digital technology.  We have to deal with this reality here in the monastery. The new postulant in formation goes through a device/internet/media "detox". Later, if a monk is assigned a cell phone for his particular assignment, he is expected to follow our custom of not using it in the monastery's public places. These measures foster the monk's freedom to hear God's "still, small voice." They protect the integrity of the heart and the cloister from the pressures of devices designed to lure us out of the place (here) and time (now) where, in silence, St. Benedict calls us to be present in love to God and each other. The unity of the monk and the "city" of the monastery is constituted by the voice of the One who calls us to Himself now, in every circumstance. If the "ear of your heart," with which you hear the voice of your "loving father" (Prologue 1), becomes deafened by the static of the threefold concupiscence constantly on offer on our devices, it is a threat to personal and communal unity, which is to say, your identity. The great, open question of "Who am I? And who are You who calls me?" is replaced by the imperious command, "Show me what I want to see!", which is finally reduced to the weary capitulation, "Tell me what I want." Where there once was true dialogue, there is now only monologue, and an increasingly dehumanizing one.

This ubiquity of devices and its attendant dangers illustrate a crisis that has been developing piecemeal for decades. In recent years, its precipitation has accelerated exponentially. For example, Jonathan Haidt's book, The Anxious Generation (2024), documented "how the great rewiring of childhood is causing an epidemic of mental illness," and many parents, educators, and parish leaders have responded by working together to create places (homes, schools, and parishes) that concretely support a play based, phone-free childhood, to best aid the healthy development of their children. Now, only two years later, the release of public AI has called into question everything from writing and dating to politics and warfare. This is no longer only about early education (if it ever was). It is about the kind of civilization we are building and inhabiting.

For this reason, Pope Leo XIV's new encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas: Safeguarding the Human Person in the Age of AI, has been greatly anticipated. Published 135 years after his predecessor, Pope Leo XIII's Rerum Novarum, which brought the Church's wisdom to bear on the threats to human dignity posed by the industrial age, Leo wishes to do the same for the digital revolution. A key concept Leo repeats several times that digital technologies are not "neutral tools." In one of the most incisive analyses on the subject, A Web of Our Own Making: The Nature of Digital Formation (2023), Anton Barba-Kay argues that this is so because the technologies themselves are designed to be invisible. In this way, they are experienced as "natural," constituting the very environment and lens through which we understand anything, or, worse, abdicate our understanding altogether. Digital technologies are strangely hard to use for one thing (like a fork); they transform everything they "touch," and not necessarily for the good.

In such a moment, it is helpful to pause and listen to the voice of the Church. We recently welcomed this voice at another moment of silence here at the Abbey. We eat dinner together in silence, listening to a monk read the Martyrology (remembering the saint of the following day), the Necrology (remembering brother monks who died on this day), the Rule of St. Benedict, and a chosen book or article, in this case, Magnifica Humanitas. So, while one monk filled another's glass with water in silence, we heard Pope Leo tell us:

"Whenever humanity is in danger of marring its true identity, we Christians lift our eyes to the Incarnate God, knowing that it is “only in the mystery of the Word made flesh that the mystery of humanity truly becomes clear.” In Jesus Christ, this humanity in its grandeur becomes the Way, the Truth and the Life, opening the path for each of us to grow toward fullness."