Creating A New Benedictine School

José Manuel Egulguren Guzmán

The first part of a talk to the International Benedictine Conference about the Manquehue Apostolic Movement's experience in education, Worth Abbey, October 1999

Introduction

I have been asked to share with you something of the Manquehue Movement's experience in education. I shall begin by explaining a little more about our Movement and its origins. Then I shall go on to offer some thoughts on Christian and specifically benedictine education. One further thing: I ask you to forgive me for my ignorance of inclusive language.

The Movement's Origins and its Educational Work

The fact that I am in education at all has to do with an experience I had when I was a university student in Santiago in the 70 s. I was twenty-five and undergoing what might best be called an existential crisis. At a time when nothing seemed to make sense to me, a benedictine monk handed me the Sacred Scriptures and taught me to read them in such a way that it seemed as though Jesus Christ himself (about whom I had heard thanks to my traditional Catholic upbringing) was revealing himself to me, risen and alive, shedding light on my life and filling it with meaning. Although I clearly remember that day when I first turned up at the monastery, this new awareness was a gradual thing. I would head up to the monastery almost every day where Fr Gabriel, with endless patience, would make time for me, address my questions, share my anxieties and help me listen to the answers that God provided me with in His Word. All this went on for three years and the extraordinary thing was precisely this, that it was not what Fr Gabriel said that mattered most, but rather whom he taught me to listen to. Little by little I began to realise that it was Jesus Christ I was coming up against and I gradually came to see that God was not an impersonal force but a person who loved and cared for me.

At the end of this period, without really knowing quite how, I ended up being put in charge of a top year Confirmation group in my old school. All I did with them was do what Fr Gabriel had done with me: take the Bible and set about discovering how the Word of God speaks to each one of us individually. Their response was remarkable. We soon became filled with ideals. We wanted to do things, change the world. We became friends, very good friends. We decided to organise ourselves and we called ourselves the Manquehue Apostolic Movement after the school we all belonged to, Manquehue School. Manquehue is the name of a nearby mountain and means 'place of condors' in the native Indian language.

One of our more important activities was our work with young children. We felt that we simply had to be with them and tell them about our experience of Jesus Christ. A very special relationship began to grow up between a number of the older students and the younger ones. They helped train the younger sports teams, helped them with their studies or simply played with them in their free time. We began to discover how this special relationship, which we began to call tutoría, was in fact a precious vehicle for talking to the children about this living God that had so much to do with their lives and all that was happening to them, who spoke to them through his Word and who heard their prayers.

It is worth pointing out that tutoría, this special relationship between older and younger students, is very much alive in our schools today. In fact, our three schools would cease to exist if they did not have tutoría. Indeed, one might say that tutoría is the soul of each school. Without the tutors our whole educational project would fall apart. As a result, given that the majority of our tutors are pupils, the students themselves must be seen as a fundamental part of our educational project.

Coming back to those early days: in the end we had to leave Manquehue School for various reasons and we began working in a parish after a brief spell of having a base in a small rented house. If I had to explain the purpose behind our community in those first years I would say this: being friends, being attentive the Word and looking to respond to His call. And when we founded San Benito College in 1982 this new project enabled us to develop this friendship, this listening and this response.

The Manquehue Apostolic Movement

Since then, the Manquehue Apostolic Movement has grown in numbers and in its scope of activities. However, its members have one essential experience in common: someone, in a spirit of loving welcome, has taught them to use the Bible in such a way as to encounter Jesus Christ in it personally. This encounter leads them to be baptised or to become more aware of what their being baptised as children meant and still means. They are aware that the fruits of their baptism are not immediately apparent, that their baptism is like a germ or seed in the ground destined to unfold in the course of their lives, like an aptitude waiting to be developed. The task ahead of them is to do all they can to cultivate this seed to its full maturity.

Over the course of the years the Holy Spirit has steered the Manquehue Movement towards the Rule of St Benedict as a way of helping its members in this task. In the Rule its members have discovered a very practical means of organising themselves in order to live out their baptism. They have found that what St Benedict wrote more than fifteen centuries ago with the aim of organising the life of a specific community made up of what he himself describes as lukewarm, lazy, disorganised and negligent people in order that they might place 'nothing before the love of Christ', serve him as their true king and journey together towards eternal life, is entirely appropriate for their lives today. The Movement constitutes, therefore, an Extended Benedictine Community, that is to say, a community of men and women who live, work and pray together under a Rule and a superior. We use the word 'extended'because, although it does have certain places of its own, unlike a monastery, the Movement has no fixed territorial boundaries and encompasses the many different places where its members live, work and pray.

Today the Movement has approximately nine hundred members: men and women, rich, not-so-rich and poor, married and single, young and old. More than a third are below the age of twenty-five. Some feel more part of the Movement than others, but at its heart lie 'the oblates' who go to make up a small inner community towards which the rest of the members converge in varying degrees of commitment. These 'oblates' are lay people who have made a stable commitment within the Movement. They currently number twenty-two: thirteen married people and nine celibates, seven women and fifteen men.

The Movement's main work, other than the celebration of the Divine Office in choir, is in education. San Benito College began in 1982 as I have already mentioned, and it has one thousand five hundred pupils. San Lorenzo College was set up in 1986 and currently is attended by six hundred pupils in a poor area in Santiago. San Anselmo College was founded in 1995 and at present has five hundred pupils, the expected future total being one thousand eight hundred once the project is complete. The three are all mixed day schools. Boarding schools are very rare in Chile. The boys and girls start at four and leave when they are eighteen years old.

Christian Education

One of the most remarkable things about the Rule of St Benedict is its adaptability: the way it has continually shown itself capable of fostering a particular way of life and an unchanging message and purpose in the most varied times and places. We know that this largely has to do with the Rule's human touch, its ability to comprehend the essence of what it is to be human, combined with that level-headedness and indomitable spirit which pervade it from start to end. When we try to define Christian education we should look to the very adaptability of the Rule as a yardstick designed to prevent us from getting confused by these changing times. Christian education, like the Rule, must adapt without losing its essential message and purpose. Technology and the media move on, market forces drift here and there, tools and instruments and social structures change, all at a terrific pace, but man remains the same. His fundamental questions remain the same and the answers available to him in the Gospel continue to be the only ones that can provide him with real life, fulfilment and meaning. Whatever the time and place, christian education must always be a matter of evangelisation.

To educate, therefore, is to create the space whereby the men and women of tomorrow can experience the existence of God and, by experience, acknowledge that He has not left us to fend for ourselves. Indeed, they must come to know that He has sent His son to reveal His love for us and that He has poured His Spirit into our hearts enabling us to cry 'Abba Father!' To educate is to draw people towards a personal encounter with Jesus Christ. It is to teach them how to listen to this God who speaks, and to accompany them so that they can respond to the Word that God is addressing them.

We must not mistake techniques and knowledge for education. As educators we must, of course, be careful not to distance ourselves from what is going on in the world nor cease in our effort to hand our students the tools they need to get on in modern life. However, we shall be doing them no favour at all if, being so concerned about training and skills, we are not capable of imparting a meaning to life, of telling them what the tools we have handed them are for.

Nor can we let ourselves reduce evangelisation to mere religious instruction or the inculcation of values, which while being a necessary part of any christian education, will end up becoming sterile unless at the same time we insist on both proclaiming a risen Jesus Christ and creating space for that all important encounter with Him.

I am often asked what sort of school leavers we are looking to produce. My only reply is to say that what we want are men and women who are able to listen to and respond to God's vocation for them. It is worth pointing out that it is often the case that this vocation is neither what a young person is expecting, nor is this vocation credible in the eyes of their family or 'society', nor even in the eyes of the people at school. Our vocation is the Word with which God addresses each one of us. It comes from God, not from us or from other people. As a result, to educate is not only a matter of teaching a person to be attentive, to listen, but also of accompanying that person in their response to the Word. Such companionship must be a question of helping, correcting and encouraging a person rather than directing them with ready-made ideas and advice.

Looked at from this perspective the motive and end of christian education must be love. Indeed, I would like to take up one of Cardinal Hume's thoughts. He says in his book In Praise of Benedict that 'at the heart of the Gospel, the Good News given to you and me, is the twofold commandment to love God and to love our neighbour. We do not automatically love God and our neighbour in the way that Our Lord means us to love them. This love has to be learnt and practised. It takes time and effort. The monastery is a school for learning such love.' He then goes on to say that 'every ordinary family should be a 'school of love'. It is in our family that we first learn what love means. When we have begun to understand what human love is, then we begin to realise what love must be like in God - so much greater, warmer, stronger and more intimate than any way we can love each other'. Our schools, like monasteries, are places where we learn and practise love. Moreover if a school is conceived to be an extension of the family, it is like a family, a place where we can understand from our experience of human love what God's love is like. We shouldn't lose sight of love when we are talking about christian education.

Education in the Manquehue Apostolic Movement

Almost any human organisation imaginable can find in the pages of the Rule sound advice on how best to manage relationships and people with a view to achieving its goals whatever they may be. To be truly benedictine, however, that goal must be to take the Gospel as a guide (cf. RB Prol. 21). Being benedictine is no more and no less than one form of being a Christian. Indeed, in the Manquehue Movement we have come to understand how the Rule of St Benedict is one particular way of living out a baptism we share with all of God's People.

Likewise, benedictine education is just one particular way of educating people in the Gospel. What makes it different from other ways is the inspiration it draws from the Rule of St Benedict. There are essentially two ways of letting this inspiration flow through our school life. One way is to go directly to the text of the Rule and ask ourselves what advice we think St Benedict would give us about a certain situation we face in school if he were with us today. The second is more indirect whereby we simply let a benedictine way of seeing and doing things pervade through the life and example of those in the school who live the Rule day in day out. I am no historian, but I am under the impression that the second way has been more common in the past few centuries. In my view, both ways of 'benedictinising' school life are indispensable and, indeed, complementary but I believe that in this day and age there are strong arguments for making the influence and presence of the Rule in our schools much more explicit.This involves painstaking work and means taking a lot of care not to suffocate what I would call the 'benedictine instinct'. Above all, this requires a deep conviction that St Benedict really has something important to say to us about education.

A few years ago we brought out a pocket sized edition of the Rule which has been put to good use in our schools. It contains the following elements:

a) The usual division of the Rule into 122 parts. Each part can be read daily allowing the whole Rule to be read in its entirety three times a year.

b) A large number of biblical references (all chosen with a view to a more pastoral rather than academic use) which allow the Word to shed as much light as possible on the text of the Rule.

c) Parallel references to other parts of the Rule where St Benedict refers to the same topic or shows a similar point of view.

d) An index of key words with corresponding references to the text.

This easy to use text has enabled us to keep in constant touch with the Rule and progress in our understanding of the saint's mind and viewpoint, thanks even to the most unlikely and seemingly outdated passages. And by combining this sort of contact with the Rule, with the example to be found in so many monasteries, and with fervent prayer to St Benedict himself (who we must remember is alive in heaven) we have been able to discover how the Rule has an enormous amount to tell us. Indeed, we have come to see how every single part of the Rule can be applied to lay life and hence to our work in education. Use of the Rule in our schools is not just confined to members of the Manquehue Movement. We ensure that every teacher learns about the Rule and how to use it in special in house training days. Our students learn how to use the Rule in religion classes and homework. Furthermore, we make sure that our parents become familiar with the Rule and draw nourishment from its wisdom through weekend workshops.