Gioia's book opens by placing the Rule of Benedict within the sapiential tradition of Scripture. The book continues by engaging the specificity of Benedictine spiritual life and of the larger Christian community through such topics as emotions, psychological maturity, sexuality, prophecy, lectio divina, the Opus Dei, compassionate listening, and leadership. The book's final chapters explore reform as a project of Vatican II and Pope Francis's prophetic papacy as it applies to challenges experienced by monastic communities and the global church. Having to deal with postmodernism, polarization, and failures in Catholic communal and moral life, both the Christian monastic and ecclesial communities find a common source of tension and transformation.
Gioia's thesis is that Benedictine spirituality is Catholic and ecclesial because of the commitment of Benedictines to the Opus Dei with which Benedictines (and their associates) routinely embody the truth that God works in and through the community—a gift offered to the wider Christian and even secular community. Gioia believes the Benedictine life that manifests God's work in creating community despite, or even because of, differences is one that should be regarded as paradigmatic. For this reason, the book could be read with great profit in seminaries and schools of theology where student life might be characterized by monastic practice. Many explorations in the book would come to life when stories drawn from personal monastic commitment could be given a theological framework for considering the relationship between experience and reflection, will and grace, solitude and community. Gioia's pithy “Spirituality and self-understanding are synonymous” itself evoked much for me to ponder (117).
Inspired by Rowan Williams’ The Way of St. Benedict, Gioia seems to believe with Williams that the Rule of Benedict evinces a monastic theology rather than just a proscription of certain conduct. Thus, Gioia's lens on the Rule is primarily theological. However, Gioia also offers in-depth commentary on sources beyond Scripture and the Rule of Benedict. Gioia engages theologically the monastic experience portrayed in the 2010 film Of Gods and Men and engages the work of Protestant and Catholic theologians, principally Williams himself and Karl Barth's discussion of monasticism in Church Dogmatics. In the book's final chapters, Gioia engages the papal and conciliar documents Evangelii Gaudium, Lumen Gentium, and Gaudium et Spes. Though all along thought-provokingly drawing on recent developments in other disciplines to make claims relevant to modern monastic life, I wished for more storytelling to illustrate these claims.
My own lingering question about the book concerns what Gioia thinks are the contributions of women to the project of articulating a monastic spirituality for the life of the church because the book cites very few women and only one female (Protestant) theologian. Though here Gioia is wonderfully interdisciplinary in not sticking to theology only but drawing on women's insights from the areas of psychoanalysis, philosophy, and interpersonal relations. Given the book's opening valorization of scriptural wisdom in the feminine form, it might have made sense to hear women's voices more prominently throughout the text. Gioia's book, underscored by its dedication to Rowan Williams as well as multiple chapter epigraphs drawn from Williams’ work, is nevertheless an exciting ecumenical vision of how Christian community might enable our living more fully into our being, what Pope Francis has named a “wonderfully complicated” people. Gioia's is in this sense a prophetic voice.
