A day beloved of all monastics (horrible word!), the feast of St Martin of Tours, pioneer of monastic living in the west, but also the ninety-first anniversary of Armistice Day, the first on which there will be no survivors of the First World War to remind us of the horror and waste of that conflict. St Benedict gives us a chapter of the Rule (34) in which he spells out how the ban on private ownership is to be worked out in the monastery: we are to have what we need, not what we want or think we need. Perhaps it's my quirky apology for a brain, or the fact that I live with such generous and inspiring people as the community here, that makes me find a connecting thread in that tension between need and desire, the sacrificing of self for the good of others.

Martin was an ascetic. In fact, even his contemporaries sometimes wondered whether his tendency to have visions was the result of overlong fasts; but he was a man of deep and genuine compassion, always ready to emerge from his solitude to plead the cause of his people or come to their aid. He understood very well that his monastic retirement was not for himself alone. His ability to live on very little taught him to be aware of the need in others.

At 11 o'clock this morning we shall be remembering the causes of the First World War, and how the seeds of the Second were sown in the punitive settlement that ended it. The desire to make Germany pay meant that, ultimately, everyone paid. Perhaps there is a message here for all who exercise power. Conflicts begin because we want something we don't have but think we have a right to, and they go on because we forget that winning is not the whole story. A wilderness is not peace. Sometimes sacrificing "victory" is the best way to ensure that history does not repeat itself.

And what of Benedict, the man of peace? The Benedictine motto is the word peace (pax) surrounded by a crown of thorns. It reminds us that peace is a struggle, that it requires a daily renunciation of all that is not peace, of the disordered desires that so often make us unhappy. Above all, I think it reminds us that for a Christian peace can only be attained through union with the sacrifice of our Lord Jesus Christ, who "did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped but emptied himself, assuming the condition of a slave". And all for love of us.