Enjoying the time you have left in the semester

If I said, “You must have a lot of time on your hands as a student,” would you give me a bombastic side eye? Well, I would deserve it. Between assignments, practices and jobs, time can feel less like the gift it is and more like water slipping away down a drain hole. Here at a Catholic Benedictine college and university, however, we’re participants in a 1,500-year tradition that encourages us to experience time not as something to control or possess, but as something holy.

When St. Benedict wrote his Rule for monastics living in community, he didn’t just provide spiritual advice. He developed a schedule — a dynamic pattern of prayer, work, study and rest. For Benedict, time was less a problem to be solved and more like the pulse of life through which God could be encountered.

Your ears are likely aware that the Benedictine day is punctuated by the ringing of bells calling monastics to prayer. Each bell is a mindful reminder: stop, breathe and return to God’s presence. For students, the bell banner at Saint John’s Abbey, for instance, can symbolize the same call — a brief pause amid the hectic schedule of college life. Moreover, every class period, meal or moment between commitments can become an opportunity to re-gather ourselves in gratitude and awareness.

Time, Benedict teaches, is not just water departing down a drain hole— it forms us. The temporal structure of work, study, prayer and rest shapes our hearts and our minds. The test is to allow that temporal rhythm to ooze into our bones, despite schedules that overwhelm and deadlines that are much closer than they appear.

Academic life demands discipline and effort, but Benedict reminds us that all work, when done with the appropriate disposition, can be prayerful (but not a substitute for prayer). While grades matter, study is ultimately about seeking truth, which is one way of seeking God.

Our classrooms, chapels and dormitories are built around the notion that learning and prayer belong together. When we take a pause before a test, offer thanks after a work shift, or listen deeply to a friend, we live out that Benedictine rhythm in our own modern way.

A key dimension to Benedict’s approach to time is that it’s communal, it’s shared. Monastics don’t set their own schedules (well, some do); they live under a common structure. That’s a challenge to our culture of individual calendars and personal hustle. On a Benedictine campus, though, we’re reminded that through time we grow not just through what we do alone, but through the dynamic rhythm we share with others. Meals in the student refectory, campus liturgies and study groups can become sacred moments of connection.

As the semester speeds up and finals approach, Benedict offers an antidote to stress: remember that time is not something to be conquered, but something to be consecrated. By ordering our days around a prayerful and purposeful structure we join a patterned rhythm that has sustained communities for centuries.

Next time you hear the monastery bells ring, take a moment. Let them remind you that each hour is holy — that when rightly lived, time itself is a path to God.