Radical Spirit

by Joan Chittister

  Random change, change for its own sake, change without purpose, can create an erratic society, an agitated life. It jerks us from new idea to new idea with no clear plan in mind. It can be exciting, yes. It can even be illuminating. But whether it can ever bring real substance needs to be an important concern. Otherwise we can find our lives at loose ends, lacking real, deep-down joy or a sense of genuine value, real belonging, a connection to continuing depth and a holy past.

  It’s change that is undertaken with the tradition in mind that counts. And for that a sense of history becomes a kind of angelic guide through a desert of possibilities. Every spiritual community needs a community memory to help it trace the values and purpose that drove the high and low points of its development. It’s not what we did that counts. That’s simply traditionalism. It’s why we do what we do that is of the essence of tradition.

  To be alive is to try things. As John Henry Cardinal Newman put it, “To live is to change, and to be perfect is to have changed often.” The reality of that insight is comforting. It is also clarion in its message: We learn as much from our failures as we do from our successes. And that’s where Benedict’s insight into the spiritual value of the eighth step of humility gives us a lighted path through change: It is the memory of the community—its recollection of opportunities missed; its recall of life-changing risks that catapulted the community into a totally new life cycle of success—that makes change a sacrament of hope.

  More even than the memory of its history of change, the model of a community’s leaders becomes their legacy to the next generation. Their being able to link past and present and still maintain the quality of spiritual life is what moves us from era to era.

  The eighth step of humility liberates us from slavish commitment to the customs of the past. It frees us to move into the light of the Spirit with hope and with faith. Then, breathing the freedom tradition brings, the next period of our lives will be even more attuned to our place in the present than the last. The eighth step of humility frees us to accept the grace of change. It stretches us to go beyond ourselves into the mind of God for the world and to make ourselves a living part of it.

  What are the spiritual implications of this step of humility?

  Groups of any size seethe with ideas. There are as many ways to do a thing in a group as there are people in the group. And that, of course, is the very foundation of creativity. But the successful group is a group with a common mind, a single purpose, a tradition. The proverbial team of horses that pulls in different directions does not pull a coach faster, it simply pulls it apart. In the end, then, it’s what individuals do in a group that really shapes the group.

  It’s the way we deal with change as individuals that will determine not only the effectiveness of the groups to which we belong but the tenor of our own souls. Change teaches us that only the eternal is eternal.

  Change affects my identity. What the group is, I am. Until it changes. And then I need to recommit all over again. “Who am I?” becomes a new question at one more disturbing time in life.

  Cultural expectations, the ground upon which we stand, shudders, too. What can people expect of me now? In fact, what am I myself willing to promise now? All the old bonds that we thought were set forever begin to pull and creak. People said of sisters who adopted new ways of ministering—soup kitchens, peace institutes, organic farming projects—that they “had left religious life.” Except that they hadn’t. But it took years before the public realized that the only thing that had changed was the way sisters ministered to the world—not the character of their commitment.

  Social integration becomes a profoundly serious factor in change. Trying to determine where I’m welcome or what I’m expected to do there now can be as frightening as it is demanding. Knowing where I fit in is essential to my sense of being. The fear of what others will think of me or expect from me or resist in me can shatter people’s confidence as well as their longtime zeal.

  I met a woman in an elevator one day who was shocked—and upset—that I was a sister who did not wear a medieval habit. How could she tell I was a sister? she demanded to know. “Easy,” I said. “Just get all the rest of the women in your parish to wear their wedding dresses. Then, when you see someone in church who’s not wearing a wedding dress, it’ll probably be a sister.” It takes time for a community to redefine itself after great change, but the fresh air of new life is worth it.

  At the same time, “we” becomes “some of us,” at best, because change is slow. It can take generations for the old to melt into the new. In the meantime, the sense of commonplace and community gets restricted, sometimes even erased.

  And yet, what else is the spiritual life but the merger of external growth and internal depth? It is precisely when change separates us from our old self that faith becomes the light in darkness and unity or consensus—real oneness, real acceptance, real understanding—becomes authentic.

  Benedictine spirituality is a spirituality with the group mind firmly rooted in the gospels but intent on the development of the community itself. A community, formed in the gospels, stands as a beacon of truth and compassion, of human harmony and spiritual light. In the eighth step of humility, all of those facets of group building are clear.

  The models I choose in the community on which to pattern my own spiritual life must be people at the heart of the best of the system. Benedict says quite rightly that our guides need to be those who best embody both the community’s future and its past. By tracing leadership images over time, the one arch virtue which, during each period, served to both hold the group together and move it on emerges as a touchstone for the ages. Tradition leads us to find experience tried and true upon which to fashion our own lives and in that way ourselves to influence others.

  I learn to live the tradition by watching the others who live here. I remember Sister Margaret, an old gnome who did nothing all day but run supplies to every part of the community. Old cotton blankets to fill the holes in the wires that held our small cots together. New sheets to replace the worn ones. Always with a smile, forever with a blessing. She was herself a model of simplicity. And Sister Pierre, the old Irishwoman who hugged homesick postulants until they could laugh. She showed me that no amount of discipline must ever smother love. Sister Remegia, who made all our clothes out of one pattern and tried to make them fit. And Sister Mary Margaret Kraus, past prioress, who did not think the past “a thing to be clung to,” who opened the windows of the community to the changes of Vatican II. They were a treasure house of tradition, the best the spiritual life had to offer.

  But not only must we choose models, we must live to become one. Which means that, as much as the community owns us, we must own it. One of the basic spiritual implications of the eighth step of humility is that to benefit from community it is essential to participate in the development of the community. It means that we must help shape the common mind and to participate in its evolution. It is a call to take my place in the fulfillment of the human enterprise, whatever human community I come from—lay, clerical, or religious. Part of my spiritual responsibility is the flowering of the character and quality of my own small piece of the world as that world grasps for new life and grows to new heights and changes. It’s then, too, that we begin to look back to the ancestors who brought us this far and cling to their examples of fidelity and hope.

  These ancestors, our models, the durability of the tradition bind us together and hold us together from one life-changing question to another. Nothing external can destroy the group that faces its stresses together, open to one another’s needs and ideas and refusing to be strangled in the attempts of any smaller part of it to suppress its growth.

  Of all the steps of humility, the eighth is the most subtle, maybe, but the most enduring as well, perhaps. Its lessons are obvious: What the group has to give me and what I myself bring to every group will, in the end, be the final measure of its worth. It and I will shape and mold one another. And even more subtle than
that is the fact that it is in the holiness of the group itself that we all become holy together.

  In the end, then, community is the ultimate test of humility. It’s in groups that bullying becomes possible—unless we stop it at its first advance. It’s in groups that we learn to listen to others and so make ourselves capable of listening to wisdom beyond our own. It’s in community that we begin to see the value and goodness of the others who cherish what we cherish but hope to preserve it in ways different than ours.

  The humility inherent in the eighth step is the call to inherit the world of the others. Once we allow someone else’s agenda to take precedence over ours, for instance, the world takes one step back from war. We ourselves come to model that strangers can differ, can listen to what may seem to each of us to be a totally different language, can care for something besides ourselves.

  Our communities—our churches, our institutions, our cities, our nation—free us from having to reinvent for ourselves all the wheels of life. In every group is the wisdom of the universe. It is simply a matter of wanting to tap into it. In every group is the answer to itself. We don’t go to groups to lose ourselves. We go to groups in order to become our best selves while we enable everybody else there to become their best selves, too. We come to groups to find the acumen we ourselves lack and become part of the enlightenment that is at the heart of the group itself.

  Our communities are the world in microcosm. It’s in them that we can see the value of tradition and the depth of communal wisdom. Groups shake off the dry leaves of the past. They prune the tree of the tradition over and over again so that in every age it lives on.

  The Benedictine symbol of Monte Cassino, Benedict’s monastery, is a tree. The inscription at its base says “Succisa virescit,” cut down it grows again. And so, the order, the tradition, moves on from generation to generation, growing here, being pruned there, always adapting to the soil in which it’s planted. And so do we as people.

  And all the while, the message is clear: There is no room in a group for rigidity, for the worship of the past, for the fear of the future. It’s exactly here where I can myself become this great tradition and seed the future with the wisdom of its past.

  Individuals join a community to find the models and support it has to offer. It’s there that I can admit my own deficiencies. It’s there that I can make up for what I lack by encouraging the growth of others. It’s there that I can attach myself to teachers who have been nourished by the acumen of the ages. It’s there that I get a close and personal glimpse of holiness alive and flourishing. It’s there that I become conscious of the glory of God in others.

  The demon of rigidity traps me in my past. Without respect for the holiness of change, my soul will turn to cement, closed to God, closed to the future.

  With trust in the Spirit who inspires change in the world, I will become part of sacred change and cocreator of an even better future.

  The ninth step of humility is that “we control our tongues and remain silent, not speaking unless asked a question, for Scripture warns, ‘In a flood of words you will not avoid sinning’ (Prov. 10:19), and ‘A talkative person goes about aimlessly on earth’ (Ps. 140:12).”

  What is the challenge here?

  To be an only child is to deal with a built-in relationship with silence. I’m an only child and, believe me, I know.

  Because the only child is alone more often than most other children, silence becomes a natural companion. At the same time, because only children are alone so often, they are unusually eager to talk with peers. Community life is a gift to them, not a problem. As I grew up, I spent a lot of time alone—reading, playing my piano, studying. I loved all of them. I never considered silence a burden. On the other hand, silence was not an obsession either. If anything, I went out looking for friends. Monastic silence, it seemed, would not be a problem for me from either perspective. Which was true, except that monastic silence, I came over the years to understand, was a completely different thing.

  The kind of situational silence I lived in was not what this step of humility has in mind. Silence, in the spiritual tradition, is about something more than simply being alone.

  Monastic silence is not only about not talking. I learned that one quickly. I was now surrounded by people with whom I would have loved to be able to spend hours of delightful but idle conversation. But in a monastery, I discovered, that was exactly what I was expected not to do.

  No, monastic silence is not so much a deprivation of human contact as it is a spiritual exercise the intention of which is to open a sacred conversation with the spiritual self. Our Novice Director was quick to point out that simply sitting down and staring vacantly into space is not a monastic exercise.

  But monastic silence does not come either quickly or easily. I remember using silence as a young novice to slip back inside myself. Sometimes I sang silent songs as I did daily chores—either one voice or another of Bach’s Two-Part Inventions. At other times, I recited old poetry. Then, eventually, as the preprofessed years went by, I began repeating litanies or mantras over and over again as I went from one task to another. The point was to keep my mind from getting caught up in my studies or my work lists or my lesson plans, devoid of reflection, submerged in the mundane.

  Finally, I began to read the Journals of Thomas Merton, a veritable mother lode of ideas that had come to him in the midst of a Cistercian silence, the most strict of all. I was looking, I realized, at silence alive, at a living silence that pulsated in my soul surely as much as it had in his. At that moment, I began to understand what “holy” silence, as they called it, was all about. It was about beginning to knead the soul until a whole new life, a new spiritual enlightenment, could rise in it.

  I knew then that the silence itself had to be nourished. It did not come out of whole cloth—at least not yet. It came out of the activity of a soul at rest—the very antithesis of noisy silence, busy silence, as I had known it.

  Merton was dealing in his soul with the ideas of great spiritual thinkers before him. Struggling to make them intelligible, even debating them a bit. He was trying on those ideas himself. Following them down the paths and crevices of his mind, he began to stretch and pull them this way and that. Out of that reflection the entirely new vision of the life they offered came into view. This, I thought, I can do.

  I began to memorize one line a day from the writings of classic or contemporary spiritual writers of the time: Augustine, Teresa of Avila, de Caussade, Janet Erskine Stuart, Eugene Boylan. Until eventually, as the years went by, the words began to come almost entirely from Scripture: “Leave the fig tree one more year….It may bear fruit next year.” And “Is not this the fast that I choose: to lose the bonds of injustice…to share your bread with the hungry?”

  The silence had become troubling, in other words. As silence is supposed to do. It began to stir up things in my soul I had never thought of before: Why were we more punishment-oriented than patient? Why didn’t we really share our bread with the poor? Was simply praying for something ever enough?

  My life was beginning to change in dangerous ways. Who could read these words and simply go on with business as usual? Who could see the face of Jesus in these words and not die from shame? Silence began to take over my soul.

  It was the silence in me that was agitating for change, for authenticity, for—of all things—outspokenness.

  I began to look at religious life as it was then structured with a wary eye. For whom were we living this life? For ourselves, it seemed. For our “sanctification” but not necessarily for anyone else’s liberation. And what did that mean for all of us?

  It was the mid-sixties before the documents came down from Vatican Council II telling religious to “examine their community’s initial purpose, the needs of their members and the signs of the times.” I knew then, without doubt, that all that silence had not been for nothing. The tradition was correct: Silence is the key to everything.

  First, silence teaches us to go d
own inside ourselves to find real life rather than to reach for it always and forever outside ourselves.

  Second, silence provides us with the harrowing ground of the soul. It breaks up the clods of our lives, it roots out the weeds, it levels the rocky ground in which we’ve grown.

  Most of all, it is in silence that we hear our own cries of fear and pain and resistance, which only in silence can really be addressed. In silence we come to know ourselves. Then, we are ready to disengage ourselves from the thickets that block the way beyond ourselves where light is and growth is and God is.

  Silence, I knew now, confronts us with the hardest question of them all: What are we hiding from that our flight into noise holds at bay?

  What is the underlying issue?

  It is very easy to valorize silence. Who isn’t looking for eternal peace and quiet? But the fundamental challenge of it remains: Why do I want peace and quiet so desperately? What kind of silence are we talking about? Are we talking about the kind of silence that enables us to escape the pressures and truths of our lives? Or is silence the way we control or ignore the people around us? The answers to those questions, Benedictine spirituality implies, are among the most important answers of the spiritual life.

  Silence has two dimensions, both of them intensely godly. No one talks about it much, but silence is not only a spiritual discipline. Silence has as much to do with what it means to be a life-giving part of the human community as it does with what it means to be piously reflective.

  No amount of talking can ever do as much to bring us face-to-face with ourselves as immersion in our inner darkness. The understanding of the role of silence in life has a great deal to do with how each of us grows and what we can eventually become. Most of all, the way we use silence as a spiritual gift has something to say about our own role in the growth and development of others, as well.