Nobody came to save us. Nobody is coming to save you. We had just moved to the Twin Cities, and I was about ten years old. My mom showed me how to take two city buses, meaning including a transfer, to get to school. If you’re surprised, you likely aren’t Gen X. We biked everywhere, without helmets. Nobody admonished us for it because they probably didn’t think too much of it. The adults generally didn’t think too much about us. They had too many other pressing things to do, like working to pay for food and shelter.

Rome wasn’t collapsing. The family was. Insert Benedict as the patron saint of nobody’s-coming-so-order-your-own-life. Latchkey sounds so, well, tame. What’s the big deal? You open the door to your home. But then, you enter it, and there is no one to help you with anything. If you have siblings, you’re responsible for them too. Nobody is coming to help you just because you’re a kid. Accept it. Order your life. So, we did.

We figured out how to make dinner, do our homework, take care of our siblings, pay for our own stuff, build things, repair things, do our own taxes, apply to college, and so on. No helicopter parenting, little to no financial or emotional support, and adult-sized expectations for kids because there were limited options and, on an unspoken level, the adults figured we could handle it. Is this a compliment? It didn’t really matter. We did handle it.

What does a sixth-century monk have to do with Gen X? Quite a remarkable overlap, as it turns out. Then, as now, the society was collapsing. As St. Gregory I documented in Dialogues, St. Benedict was born of a good family in 480 and sent to imperial schools, but he became disillusioned with the decadence and decay of the Eternal City. The Roman senate was as feckless as our own, and the city was under constant siege, internal (famines and plagues) and external (raids), with Rome sacked by the Goths in 546. He died in 547 in Monte Cassino, the monastery he founded in 529. However, St. Benedict’s response to all this turmoil was not despair or apathy. He simply wrote the Rule.

The Rule is one of the most remarkable pamphlets in history, not for its prose, literary qualities, depth of thought, or analysis, but for the audacity and simplicity of its countercultural move. As the most formidable empire in the world was falling apart, he sets down in writing rules for living outside of the chaos while still inside of the collapse. He understood that nobody was coming to save him, not an emperor, a king, another kingdom. Nobody. So, he saved himself…and later western civilization. But we’ll get to that.

On the surface, the Rule might seem antiquated, hierarchical, and prescriptive. Monks (men and women) vow stability, obedience, and conversatio morum (continual conversion of life and self). You might have noticed that the vows, stability and conversatio morum, seem to contradict themselves. More accurately, they balance themselves. Stability is not earned by not changing. Changing in the right way keeps stability from becoming rigidity. In other words, ordering yourself and your life by reorienting yourself, as in the Rule, to God gives you both order and resilience.  

As St. Benedict did, Gen X had to figure it out too. It didn’t write a set of rules. The closest it came to a formal tract was Douglas Coupland’s book, Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture. It was an ad hoc process. The generation used music, videos, movies, basically the culture of its time, to express what it couldn’t state on paper. It was both the best of childhoods, free and elemental, and one of the most demanding in modern history. Not because we were asked to fight in a world war or do anything heroic, but because the family structure had stopped supporting us the way it had previous generations. A two-parent family became one parent, and with this transformation, the kids became adults while still trying to be kids.

We are now living through another societal convulsion. This time, it is less about the family and more about ourselves. Who are we? Can we sit in silence with ourselves for even a few minutes, or are we terrified of our own thoughts and feelings? Do we trust God and ourselves? Do we spend more time scrolling through a feed that seduces the mind into rage than we do settling the mind into peace? I think we all know the honest answers to these questions. Nobody is coming to save you. Order your mind and your life. 

Some things come as the wind, quiet and providential. Trust the Holy Spirit to work while you sleep. They had given us oblate candidates the Sutera version of the Rule because they preferred it, but I couldn’t read it. It switched voice too much for an initial read. Then, during our two-day final oblation retreat, I saw, in my room, Benedict’s original. After we had all retired for the evening, I started reading it. I couldn’t stop. I thought, “This is great!” I could finally follow it and finished it that night. The Spirit came at the last minute and just in time to keep my final oblation true to expectations.

Some things come as an internal battle, loud and hard. The real battle is not between right and left, parties, platforms, or even institutions. St. Benedict understood a truth we would do well to remember: politics will not change who you are. Only you can do that. The real battle is your own with yourself. The first ordering of a life starts with your person. Where is your heart? Can it love your enemies? Can it forgive? Can it see your fellow citizens as Christ would see them? Can you align your heart with God’s will?

When you are ready to order your mind and your life, here are a few suggestions about where to start. First, do an audit. Honestly answer the questions above; do an examination of conscience; and then make an accurate record of how you spend your time. After you have gathered this information, replace phone scrolling time with a classic or older movie, later with reading a chapter or more of a good novel, next with going for a walk, and finally by sitting in silence.

The practice of centering prayer is sitting in silence in love with God. Nothing is asked of you. Nothing is asked of God. Creator and created simply being in love. With consistent practice, starting from a few minutes to 20-25 minutes at a sit, the internal battles will get quieter. Your mind will still drift; your emotions will still call, but you will say your sacred word, whatever reverent form it takes, and try to release those thoughts into time. They arise; you release and return to God.

Life will remain hard, and the society’s collapse will likely continue, but you will slowly transform yourself into someone who can live outside of the chaos. The Benedictine communities ended up saving Europe from itself because they followed a sixth-century monk’s Rule, its balance of structure and productive change. You do not need to save the society, and neither it nor anybody is going to save you. You are going to save yourself by ordering your own life. What you may find is that the more you do so, the easier your life becomes, not because the world is changing but because you are. Centuries from now, history might repeat itself, but that is God’s domain. Yours is the one you live in – your own life.

by Ann Job, published on September 20, 2026