Most of all, looking back on all our angers, all our lies, all our rantings about the sins of others, we now know ourselves capable of the worst. In the spiritual X-ray of the human condition, we have finally discovered ourselves to be the most human, human being of all. Most important, we don’t have to deny it anymore.
We have now completed the journey to our own humanity. We are human and know in the face of our own continual struggle to become—to rise as often as we fall—when we see the other struggle, too. “There but for the grace of God go I.”
The seventh step of humility is the self-knowledge, the self-acceptance I need to believe in growth and compassion both for myself and for others.
The demon of perfectionism blinds us to the possibility, the necessity of ongoing personal growth.
It is here at the seventh step of humility that we finally learn not to say any longer “That’s the way I am.” Now we are able to say with great goodwill and certain faith, “There is more that I can become.”
The eighth step of humility is that we do only those things “endorsed by the common rule of the monastery and the example set by the prioress or abbot.”
What is the challenge here?
It was the night before Final Profession—a totally life-giving event—and we were all bent over our desks working frantically on last-minute preparations for the ceremony the next day. Every vow paper had been handwritten. Each of them would be signed separately in the course of the ceremony next to the Benedictine Cross at the bottom of the page. I had designed the cross—about the size of a quarter with a blank spot in the middle—to be inked in by the sister after she signed her name. Finally, satisfied with the crisp black of the cross and the precision of its four fanned corners, I piled the papers on the Director’s desk to be given to each of us in the morning.
The Director found me just getting ready for bed. She handed me the pile of vow papers and said, “We don’t make the cross that way. These will have to be redone.” “We don’t make the cross that way” was code for “It’s not our tradition.”
I can argue the point of tradition and traditionalism, of course. Tradition is vital, but traditionalism is nothing more than its weak shadow sister. Traditionalism repeats the past, it considers the past impeccable and so suppresses the development of a bona fide tradition in the present. The distinction between those two approaches stuck for my entire life. There are some things that seem meaningless, perhaps, but that touch the very center of the identity of a people, a culture, a tradition. Determining what those are is the real crux of the problem.
There is a point in life when the last thing in the world anybody wants to hear is directions from someone else, someone older, someone who has been there before. This is our time. This is my life. This is the way I want to do things. The way it’s been done before us, has no meaning whatsoever at a time like this. I remember the period well. There were so many people older than we were, all of whom had been trained in a different world, all of whom were intent on preserving it. And there I was, trying to straddle them all—to design a picture of the old cross in a new way.
After all, to be young is to be in the business of finding the self, of developing a voice, of being able to choose, to decide, to strike out on your own. It’s all about learning not simply to be yourself but to trust yourself as well. And that may well mean making decisions unlike the decisions other people think you should make. It’s about failing at some of them, as I learned that night—and then learning from those mistakes.
It’s called the growth process. It’s trial and error, try and fail, fail and try again.
The message of the vow papers was clear: To do otherwise than what had been done before us was to fail to live the life as the life was meant to be lived. As it had been lived before this time. As the tradition demanded.
But, if the truth were known, I had already begun to wonder what sameness had to do with holiness. I debated with myself about why these ways were better than the many other ways the same things could be done: like how to hold a prayer book, or the meticulous way to sing the psalms, or how to break dinner bread into pieces small enough to balance my knife and fork. All of which customs were tightly defined.
They seemed to me to be preservation for its own sake. I could not come up with a single sensible reason for not going with the flow of time around us. In this country at least, no one puts pieces of bread under their silverware anymore as we were being trained to do. It was only on a trip to France years later that I learned that when plates were scarce there, pieces of bread were used to clean the diner’s dish between courses. Apparently the custom of dividing bread into small pieces was an important European peasant thing from centuries ago. But now?
More than that, such rigid procedures for such inconsequential behaviors tended to lock down the mind. If breaking bread at meals was such a hidebound process, how could a woman ever begin to imagine being something other than a teacher here? In a society in which education had long since become compulsory, would we ever be able to imagine other ways of serving people? The ones wandering our streets now—cold, hungry, mentally limited, and ignored by the system at large, for instance.
Clearly, custom and tradition and sameness had become matters of moral import. Matters that affected the very impact of religious life itself.
I watched women come—wanting to be part of a deeply spiritual, purposeful kind of community life—and go—not wanting the formalism, the rigidity, the relentless conformism that went with it.
So what was this step of humility, which seemed to confirm such a static life? Could it ever have any real meaning in my life? In anybody’s life?
It was the tumultuous sixties when the floodgates began to open. The world had apparently reached another one of those moments when its tectonic plates were shifting, knocking against one another, rupturing the earth on which we all had stood for centuries. Now, past ways in almost every discipline or social structure began to give way to new views of what it meant to be alive.
Young American men began to refuse induction into armies that willy-nilly went to war on command. The Vietnam War fractured the national consensus on what it meant to serve your country.
This time it was resistance against marijuana rather than the prohibition of alcohol that divided the generations.
Now young women began to demonstrate for women’s rights again—and pressure for entrance into previously all-male enclaves.
African Americans did sit-downs at government buildings, did sit-ins at white people’s lunch counters, conducted voting registration campaigns throughout the South, demanded desegregation.
We were in a national game of pickup sticks. Everything we had thought would be eternally unchangeable had been thrown up into the air and come back down in total disarray.
In the Catholic Church, Vatican Council II ushered in not only the right to question even the fundamentals of the life, the liturgy, the purpose of our rigid practices in both parishes and religious orders, but even the obligation to do so. Tradition and everything it implied about rigidity as a way of life came noisily into question.
Suddenly, everybody came alive. The notion of immutability that had been built into the spiritual life began to crumble. Suddenly there was more to the spiritual life than the repetition of age-old systems, conventions, and customs. We began to imagine a life that was at least as much about adult thinking as it was about childlike submission. To be a woman religious, I could see now, was about being an adult woman in the Church, a real carrier of the faith as well as a consumer of its edicts. We were being invited, in other words, to learn from experience, to value wisdom figures, to follow the path of those who had tried life and found it navigable, whatever its difficulties.
The question, of course, is, What happens when the past is scuttled simply because it reflects the values of ages gone by? And, conversely, what happens to the present when the past supplants it? What is the effect of change? What is the difference between tradition and trad
itionalism? The truth is that the entire world is dealing with these questions right now.
Internationalism, technology, communications systems, psychology—every modern discipline stands at the breakpoint between the past and the future. One side of the divide ended with World War II. The other side of the divide began with the nuclear age, the space age, the age of technology, diversity, globalism, and, yes, Vatican II, the council that called the Church to enter the modern age.
The two worlds were alike only in name.
Suddenly nothing looked changed and at the same time nothing was the same as it had once been.
The Leave It to Beaver generation, for instance, whose TV series celebrated the nuclear families of working fathers, stay-at-home mothers, and teenagers in sports coats and pleated skirts, simply disappeared when none of us were looking. In a late-twentieth-century world, white supremacy gave way to the Civil Rights Movement, Vietnam protests, ecumenism, and feminism.
No, the notion of family didn’t change, but the way we went about being families did: old homesteads disappeared as new families began to spread out across the country, following large corporations from one job to another. Blended families became a new norm. Even the definition of marriage was rethought.
Business, too, was transformed by new theories of leadership and the findings of organizational psychology. Companies got bigger, less local, and workers who had expected to stay with the same industry until they retired found themselves part of mass production systems. Now central corporate offices were in another state or even in another country. Employers were distant and unknown figures. Workers, like the products they made and sold, became just more anonymous pieces of the process. The voice of the laborer became lost in the maelstrom.
Populations diversified, communications divided the national mind into multiple perspectives on the same topics, national boundaries gave way to a more porous global internet. What had been clear and stable national cultures began, with the merging of East and West, to be multicolored, multilingual, and amorphous.
In the backs of our minds, the categories of culture, our traditions—family, religion, work, country, neighborhood—all stood as pillars of society. But the customs, the protocols, the papal decrees, the structures that once were their glue all succumbed to new ways of being fathers, mothers, careerists, believers.
Even churches found that the list of immutables, unchangeables, absolutes, and unquestionable canons were, in fact, all in question.
“It’s always been this way” became “We don’t do that anymore.”
Now the universal question became how to maintain the essence of each category while none of the old dictums were still sacrosanct.
After Vatican II shook the nineteenth-century foundations of the Catholic Church, Catholicism’s relationship with other religions and new definitions of our own became paramount. We ourselves worked on those questions for over twenty-five years. Trying to determine how to tell the tradition—the essence of Christianity and Catholicism—from traditionalism—the past customs and cultural practices that had come to be considered its essence—plunged the whole community into the depths of theological, psychological, and social development.
But without such periods of history, I realized, every institution on the planet will fossilize, will crumble, or, worse, will go on existing but without purpose. We would become nothing more than artifacts, cultures of empty shells from an earlier age.
Questions like this mark every era of abrupt and total change. They represent crossover points in every society. Every century has negotiated them in one way or another. But now, in our society, they come with an added concern. When change is the new normal, what becomes of long-standing but slow-moving institutions as the world tilts wildly from one side to another?
These questions, I came to see, are important for the spiritual life in a special way. After all, what road to God is sure if devotion and even theology must change to meet the character of a world awash in newness of both data and culture? What spirituality can possibly accommodate the best of the past and still embrace the challenges of the new in such a revolving door of understandings?
These were questions, I knew without doubt, upon which our very lives depended.
What is the underlying issue?
Change at any level, personal or social, is always difficult. Even change that for whatever reason is desired can be destabilizing enough to break the hearts of those who are forced, with little or no involvement on their part, to be part of it. Change, after all, is the journey from familiarity to the unknown, from security to fear, from a history of success to the possibility of failure.
As a result, resistance is inevitable. It is also stultifying. If the urgency of the journey from stability to change is not apparent, if the reasons for change are not persuasive, the hope for change is at best weak. And yet, for anything to remain what it is, it will need at some time or other to change just to stay what it is, to keep up with yesterday, let alone tomorrow.
In the global society in which we live, where people and organizations are daily being shifted from one side of the world to another, change has become a fact of life for individuals and institutions everywhere. In fact, a whole new basement industry has grown up called change management. The purpose of this new network of management, business, communications, and social psychology is to make what could easily disrupt, even destroy, stable institutions as smooth as possible. Where individuals are concerned, it serves as a kind of spiritual and psychological thermometer of the ability to survive change. But the truth is that, however large and established an organization may seem to be, however strong the individuals whose lives have been uprooted, the challenge of companioning people through the process of major change is a delicate one.
The hidden element in change is that it can be done on paper, by the flicks of pens of those who will be least directly affected by it. At the same time, change can come down hard on the lives of those who are not only the carriers of the institution but in many cases its creators and developers as well.
And therein lies the problem. After the release of the documents of Vatican II, the great effort for change in the Church erupted in a maze of emotional confusion. We struggled with the idea of change in the structures of religious orders. We strained to balance the skewing of perceptions of change among the faithful as well as in the hearts of religious themselves. What would happen to the traditions that gave the spiritual life meaning? In fact, what would happen to tradition itself? Was the past considered useless now? Lost? Simply being abandoned? And at what cost to us all?
Change in the Church and religious life was not about how to manufacture smartphones more efficiently around the world. This change was about how to help people find God in a basically secular or strangely new spiritual world in whole new ways, sometimes even in a whole new language. It meant making a deeply rooted spiritual life new again for another age.
A lifestyle long geared to apparent changelessness found itself dealing with a call to live newly in a new world. The challenge was momentous. Just as the change to women’s suffrage shook the secular world, the inclusion of women in discussions on change in their own religious institutions upended the churches. Just as desegregation affected neighborhoods and cities and white supremacy, the thought of religious on the streets with the poor rather than inside religious institutions brought the Church to a whole new way of being.
Just as the country had to find its identity all over again after periods of massive social change, so did we. How to change what had seemed unchangeable, without corrupting the charism, the purpose, that drove it was the issue. How to change what it looked like or how it operated without destroying what it was about at the soul of it, was the spiritual task of the generation.
The outbursts of newness at every level of the faith—clerical, academic, lay, and religious—convulsed the system from top to bottom. What seemed theoretically desirable one day became the fault lines of revolution t
he next. How much change could the need for change tolerate without bringing down the entire institution with it?
And all the while, the eighth step of humility, to do only those things “endorsed by the common rule of the monastery,” acted both as a barrier to change and as the only sensible companion through it.
It was time to wrestle with the difference between tradition and traditionalism in a rapidly changing world. It was a new question in institutions that took for granted that yesterday was a guide for tomorrow. The spiritual importance of the value of tradition was incontestable, of course. But the tendency to make traditionalism—the repetition of a thing simply because it has “always been done this way”—a worthy substitute for tradition was eating like a moth at the threads that made a spiritual life in a modern world possible. It created a built-in tension: the most important one of all.
Tradition is what constitutes the heart and the soul of an institution, its purpose and reason for being, its highest vision of itself and its deepest dreams. Traditionalism includes all the tiny little customs and practices, laws and explanations that reflect the insights important to maintaining that tradition in every particular age that succeeds it.
Jesus of Nazareth became “Jesus of the Galilee” where the needs of the day were most apparent and the concerns of the people least heard. That Jesus had no qualms whatsoever about confronting the tradition with the shortfalls of traditionalism.
As Godfrey Diekmann, monk of St. John’s Abbey in Minnesota, told his students, “Tradition is not the stuff we pass on; tradition is the passing on of the stuff.” Tradition lives and thrives on the energy and clarity of its vision and its dreams, its purpose and its goals. Traditionalism stands to smother the tradition under an avalanche of time-bound practices that served one generation well but have little spiritual nourishment or meaning to offer the next.
Which is where the eighth step of humility becomes a light in the darkness.
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