In the ancient Camaldolese strain of Benedictine spirituality there is an emphasis on what is called the triplex bonum, or the three-fold good, which can be informative and even prescriptive for a contemporary Christian spirituality.
The first good is community:
"Living together as brothers and sisters is the first good. It is founded on personal relationships, through understanding, mutual acceptance, dialogue, and service." (1). In short, cohesiveness and unity. Mutual acceptance means that we recognize and accept differences in order to find points of unity; dialogue, means that we talk to and listen to each other engaging in mutual communication in order to achieve dialogue, and service means that regardless of differences, we are always in the service of love towards the other. The primacy of love, which can only happen in the context of community, especially in the family and the church, (love must always have another object) is always the overarching rule for residency in the kingdom of God.
The second good is solitude:
Silence and solitude is essential to human, and especially, Christian flourishing. We may certainly hear God's voice when we are with others. Perhaps something hits you in a sermon or a friend says just the right thing at the right time, and you know it's meant for you. However, personal time in solitude for communion with God and reflection on what we say and hear from him is essential to our spiritual life and on the other two goods of Camaldolese Benedictine spirituality: community and evangelical witness. It is only through the filter of our personal time reflecting with God that we are capable of absorbing God through others and through encountering God in the scriptures, liturgy and personal experience.
Part of the sequnda bonum of solitude is silence. It is in silence before God that we allow our egos to be redirected by God. As one writer confessed, "When I became a Christian I was taught to faithfully take my prayer list to God daily. I got pretty good at this, but eventually noticed that I was doing all the talking. I was giving my list to God the way I would give a list of orders to a customer-care person, never allowing him to get a word in edgewise." Egocentricity in personal prayer carries over into egocentric living. As Thomas Merton opined, “When society is made up of men who know no interior solitude it can no longer be held together by love."
The third good is evangelical witness:
"The chief characteristic of the third good consists in unconditional love or total self-giving" (2) in imitation of Christ' total self-emptying (kenosis) in the service of others and the common good. Encounters with God in solitude and community drive us to sacrificial, personal and communal witness to and for the Kingdom. For no small reason was Christ's final command to, "Go into all the world...and make disciples." One of the greatest paradoxes of the Christian faith is that you can only keep what you give away.
Community, solitude and evangelistic outreach seems to be the method that Jesus embraced as well. Community, first in the Holy Family, in the more expansive Jewish worship community, in his initial band of rag-tag followers and in his redemptive embrace of all. Solitude in his frequent habit of departing to the desert or mountain to pray and evangelical witness in his every moment of human contact in which he revealed and connected others to God.
1. https://sites.google.com/site/trinityprioryinternational/who-we-are/-camaldolese-benedictines
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