How did Esther de Waal, the daughter of an Anglican vicar, get involved with the Rule of St. Benedict?

Esther de Waal, daughter of an Anglican country vicar, grew up in a traditional Christian family on the Welsh borders. Her father's antiquarian interest give her an interest in landscapes and buildings, visual as well as written history. At Cambridge she studied history and then did research at the Department of Local History at Leicester. In her twenties she got married and had four sons in five years. Her husband ministered successively as Chaplain to Nottingham University, in Lincoln Cathedral, and for 10 years as Dean of Canterbury. In all three places she did as much teaching as family responsibility allowed. Canterbury was a special moment of Providence for her. Was it also an experience of God's sense of humour?

Because my husband was Dean of the Cathedral, we lived in a house - the Deanery - that had been the Prior's lodging, in the middle ages, of the Benedictine monastic community. So here I was, wife, mother of four then teenage sons, living in a house that had once been inhabited by Benedictine monks. Being a historian, I felt I had to get o the bottom of this story. I think it was the consciousness of buildings that made me so interested, not only in our own house, but in all the ruins that lay around. The monastic presence was inescapable. There was the brew house and the bake house and the monks at the bottom of the garden; there was the infirmary garden on one side of the house. To post a letter I would take a short cut through the cloisters.

So I picked up the Rule of St. Benedict and said to myself that I'd better come to grips with what all this was about. And then I was overwhelmed because that short text, only 9,000 words, so improbable, written by a man in sixth century Italy, for a group of men living together, spoke to me not as a historian, but really as if it were addressed to me in the depths of my own humanity.

It spoke to me of things I was struggling with in my own life: how to hold a family together because a family and a community have got so much in common; how to handle the ordinary things in life and make these a way to God; how to keep the open door of hospitality and a warm welcome to everyone who comes, without allowing oneself to be exhausted by the constant pressure of people. And in all of this how to find time and space for prayer while living a very ordinary, practical, day-to-day life.

It was by sheer chance that I came to write a little book - Seeking God: The Way of St. Benedict. Every year, if you are Anglican, there is a Lent Book which people are supposed to take as their Lenten reading. It is usually written by someone of ecclesiastical distinction and commissioned well in advance. But for 1984 things went wrong. They had no script and they asked me to write a book in six months. I did so simply because it was a challenge. I had never written or expected to write on a religious subject.

I wrote very much in the middle of my own family life, quite often writing at the kitchen table at the same time as I was cooking. In these snatched odd moments I wrote of this extraordinary man who had such a grasp of the human psyche and of practical living that he helped me to find God in my day-to-day life, who helped me above all in my relationships, in loving people as they need to be loved.

Then an extraordinary thing happened. The book written with lay people in mind was read by monks, the real professionals, so to speak. They read it aloud in their refectories, they read it with their guests and novices. I think they found it quite refreshing that a lay woman had turned to the source of their own life and found it so invigorating and so energizing for herself. So out of this book came something I could never had envisaged happening, again something mysterious: God's sense of timing.

Because those sons were just about to leave home, there was going to be a huge vacuum in my life when they all left. Just then I began to be asked to take retreats, to give lectures. But, because one can so often talk about spirituality and not always experience it, I also began to organize weeks when a group of people, ideally about 25, would come together and live the Benedictine rhythm, that holistic balance of body, mind and spirit. We would pray together so that the day was organized according to the framework of the Offices. We would study together all the insights of the Rule. Then we would share manual work: whatever there was to be done where we happened to be.

In this way, not only did we enter into the holistic and healing rhythm of recognizing that we are all made up of body, mind and spirit, and that we should pay attention to these three God-given elements in ourselves, but we found that Benedict was also helping us to listen to one another, to accept one another and to love one another. So at the end of a week, this disparate group of people - I always tried to make sure they were people from differing backgrounds, different denominations - left with a sense of how the Rule of St. Benedict gives you practical tools and equipment, not only to deepen your own spiritual life, but also to learn how to live more fully and deeply with other people.

We had forgotten our labels, Anglican, Catholic, Quaker, Methodist, etc. We had formed a community. And I am glad to say that this simple formula has been followed in many other places where such weeks are held regularly every year. I am happy to know that people are finding the Rule of St. Benedict as relevant and creative today as it was when it was originally written 1,500 years ago.

For me one of the significant things about the Rule is that, written in the fifth or sixth century, it takes me back to something very early in the Church, beyond all the wretched party labels of the churches, beyond and behind the tragic spills of the Reformation, behind the schism of East and West. It takes me back to some deep, shared, common ground in our Christian tradition, and, also, I come to feel, to some deep and early point within my own self.