Michael Casey - Seventy-Four Tools for Good Living: Reflections on the Fourth Chapter of Benedict’s Rule

Ancient monastic authors often stressed their wish to be of use to readers. Like them, Michael Casey has written a useful volume, a volume to live by. Drawing on a wealth of sources, and reading deeply in the book of experience, he shows what a vast perspective is indicated in the little Rule of Benedict, what fullness of life is in store for those who follow it with courage and coherence.

Eric Varden, OCSO

Mount Saint Bernard Abbey

Seventy-Four Tools for Good Living is Michael Caseys ingenious way of rendering the wisdom of St. Benedict for our times. As a master teacher, he weaves together sources from the monastic tradition and contemporary insights through these seventy-four tools. If this is not his best book, it is certainly his most readable and gracious offering to his students and readers. This is a book that comes from his personal lectio and living the monastic way of life in Australia. It is also a book I can use for lectio and living my monastic way of life here in Indiana. Lay contemplatives, especially oblates, will find this a cut above the books published in most bibliographies on monastic spirituality. This book matters!

Meg Funk, OSB

Our Lady of Grace Monastery

Michael Casey brings a deep lived knowledge of the monastic tradition to this splendid set of reflections on Benedicts Rule. He manages to marry faith commitment to pastoral common sense in such a manner that monks and laity as well can find answers to that request made to the old desert dwellers: Give me a good word. Casey, in fact, gives us many good words.

Lawrence S. Cunningham

John A. OBrien Professor of Theology (Emeritus)

The University of Notre Dame

In my regular university course on the Rule of St. Benedict as a mirror to present-day culture there is close reading of some chapters of the Rule. To my shame I tended to neglect chapter four a bit. Michael Caseys deep reflections in this remarkable book are nourished by a half century of monastic reading and deep psychological and existential insight. I can now draw from nearly 300 pages of wisdom on the fourth chapter of Benedicts Rule. Just to quote from Fr. Michaels preface: There is much more in Benedicts Rule than meets the superficial eye.

Wil Derkse

Andreas van Melsen Chair for Science, Society and Worldviews (retired)

Catholic Radboud University of Nijmegen

The Netherlands

Imprimi potest: Abbot Steele Hartmann, OCSO, 26 January 2014.

Cover design by Ann Blattner. Illustration: Thebaid, attributed to Gherardo Starnina (13351413), Uffizi Gallery, Florence, Italy. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

2014 by Order of Saint Benedict, Collegeville, Minnesota. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, by print, microfilm, microfiche, mechanical recording, photocopying, translation, or by any other means, known or yet unknown, for any purpose except brief quotations in reviews, without the previous written permission of Liturgical Press, Saint Johns Abbey, PO Box 7500, Collegeville, Minnesota 56321-7500. Printed in the United States of America.

The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Casey, Michael, 1942

Seventy-four tools for good living : reflections on the fourth chapter of Benedicts Rule / Michael Casey, OCSO.

pages cm

ISBN 978-0-8146-3720-3 ISBN 978-0-8146-3745-6 (ebook)

1. Christian lifeCatholic authors. 2. Christian lifeMeditations. 3. Benedict, Saint, Abbot of Monte Cassino. Regula. Caput 4. Quae sunt instrumenta bonorum operum.
I. Title.

BX2350.3.C373 2014

255'.106dc23

2014001609

For Richard Franklin
After fifty years