Prefer nothing to Christ
Benedict leaves Rome
The Roman world is coming apart. The old order everyone assumed was permanent is sliding into chaos, and Rome itself has become, to a young man named Benedict, a city too dissolute to live in. He does not stay to fight for it or to mourn it. He turns his back and withdraws, first to a cave and then to a community he gathers and orders by a rule of his own writing — a life balanced between prayer and work, plain and steady, governed by a single conviction he sets at its heart: that one should prefer nothing whatever to Christ. It looks, from the outside, like retreat. A man fleeing a sinking world to tend his own small garden of devotion. But the monasteries that grew from his rule became something the collapsing empire could not have imagined: arks. Through centuries of breakdown they carried Scripture, learning, and the slow disciplines of the faith, copied and prayed and kept alive when almost everything else was being lost. Benedict's break from a dying world was not an abandonment of it. It was the quiet laying of a foundation. The empire would fall. The thing he built on its margins would outlast it by a thousand years.
“Seek first God's Kingdom, and his righteousness; and all these things will be added to you.”
— Jesus — Matthew 6:33 (WEB)
“One thing is needed; Mary has chosen the good part, which will not be taken away from her.”
Disconnect here looks like retreat but is actually foundation-laying. The phase asks you to resist the urge to grab for control of a collapsing order and instead to withdraw and build something small, steady, and centered on Christ — trusting that the modest thing you raise on the margins may outlast everything that is presently falling.
When the world around you is coming apart, the instinct is to grab for control, to fight harder and manage more and hold the collapsing thing together by sheer effort. Benedict shows another move entirely, and it is easy to mistake for surrender. The faithful move may be the opposite, and it can look like surrender: to withdraw and build something small, ordered, and centered on Christ, while the larger order does whatever it is going to do. This is not passivity, and it is not despair. It is the recognition that you cannot save the empire, but you can, by grace, build an ark. Benedict shows the break that looks like mere retreat and is actually the laying of a foundation.
The work looks modest from the outside — a rule, a rhythm, a handful of committed people, nothing that will make headlines while the headlines are full of collapse. But the modest, ordered, Christ-centered thing has a way of outlasting the spectacular thing that scorned it. The foundation you lay quietly now, in a season when everyone else is scrambling, may be the floor that others stand on long after the crisis that frightened you has passed into history. Prefer nothing to Christ, and build.
In the Church's most chaotic eras, renewal has often come not from the threatened center but from those who quietly disconnected to build something stable and Christ-centered on the margins. As the Roman world slid into ruin, the monastery outlasted the empire, carrying Scripture, learning, and the slow disciplines of the faith through centuries of breakdown when almost everything else was lost. The pattern recurs across the whole Body: when the permanent-seeming Christian order collapses, the faith is kept not by those scrambling to hold the spectacular thing together but by small, ordered communities of the deeply committed who prefer nothing whatever to Christ. They have carried the Church through collapse before, and can carry it again.
What cannot be shaken is the Christ to whom nothing is to be preferred. Empires crumble and the permanent-seeming order slides into chaos, but the One the ark was built around does not slide with it. When everything assumed to be lasting has fallen, He remains, and what was built on Him remains with Him.
- Where am I grabbing for control of something collapsing, when I am called instead to withdraw and build?
- What small, ordered, Christ-centered thing could I lay as a foundation in this unsteady season?
- Is there anything I am presently preferring to Christ that the shaking is asking me to set beneath Him?
Lord, when the world I trusted is coming apart, keep me from grabbing wildly for control. Teach me to withdraw and build something small and steady around You, preferring nothing whatever to You. Let me lay a quiet foundation others can stand on, long after the collapse has passed. Amen.