Dedication
This book is dedicated to my community—the Benedictine Sisters of Mount Saint Benedict Monastery, Erie, Pennsylvania—whose lives make this work possible and these words true. With love and pride.
Acknowledgments
It would be very strange, I think, if a book about community life could ever be done alone. This one, at least, certainly was not.
I am especially indebted to those people who read the manuscript from multiple perspectives and provided both fine suggestions and encouraging responses. Particular among them are Lawreace Antoun, S.S.J., Marlene Bertke, O.S.B., Robert Bilheimer, Mary Collins, O.S.B., Peter Gilmour, Patrick Henry, Mary Lou Kownacki, O.S.B., Johnette Putnam, O.S.B., Barbara Thomas, SCN, Marlene and Jerry Trambley, Barbara and Virgil Roseborough, and Anne Vinca.
Manuscript preparation takes precision and commitment. Without Stephanie Campbell, O.S.B., Mary Grace Hanes, O.S.B., and Mary Ann Luke, O.S.B., believe me, this one would not have seen the light of day.
Thanks to Marcie Bircher, O.S.B., the artwork in the text links the present interpretation of Benedictine spirituality with its tradition in very classic form.
No one I know is able to write unless someone else smooths the way, maintains the daily obligations that get suspended during long days of intense concentration, and prods the work through its long, dark periods. In this case all of that and more was done, both for me and the community, by Maureen Tobin, O.S.B., subprioress of the monastery.
The inspiration for the work really came from Jan Johnson, my editor at Harper & Row, whose own insights and interest first envisioned this work.
Finally, I acknowledge with gratitude the contributions of the community that has formed me and made this life and these reflections possible.
Contents
Dedication
Acknowledgements
1. The Rule: A Book of Wisdom
2. Listening: The Key to Spiritual Growth
3. Prayer and Lectio: The Center and Centrifuge of Life
4. Community: The Basis of Human Relationships
5. Humility: The Lost Virtue
6. Monastic Mindfulness: A Blend of Harmony, Wholeness, Balance
7. Work: Participation in Creation
8. Holy Leisure: The Key to a Good Life
9. Giftedness: Making Music Together
10. Hospitality: The Unboundaried Heart
11. Obedience: Holy Responsibility
12. Stability: Revelation of the Many Faces of God
13. Monastic Practices: The Way of Conversion
14. Peace: Sign of the Disarmed Heart
15. The Monastic Vision: Gift for a Needy World
Appendix
Glossary
About the Author
Credit
Copyright
About the Publisher
1
The Rule: A Book of Wisdom
Are you hastening toward your heavenly home? Then with Christ’s help, keep this little rule that we have written for beginners. After that, you can set out for the loftier summits of the teaching and virtues we mentioned above, and under God’s protection you will reach them. Amen.
RB 73:8-9
The ancients tell a story of the spiritual life that may best explain this book:
A young monastic came upon an elder one day sitting among a group of praying, working, meditating people.
“I have the capacity to walk on water,” the young disciple said. “So, let’s you and I go onto that small lake over there and sit down and carry on a spiritual discussion.
But the Teacher answered, “If what you are trying to do is to get away from all of these people, why do you not come with me and fly into the air and drift along in the quiet, open sky and talk there.”
And the young seeker replied, “I can’t do that because the power you mention is not one that I possess.”
And the Teacher explained, “Just so. Your power of remaining still on top of the water is one that is possessed by fish. And my capacity of floating through the air can he done by any fly. These abilities have nothing to do with real truth and, in fact, may simply become the basis of arrogance and competition, not spirituality. If we’re going to talk about spiritual things, we should really be talking here.”
Just about every person I have ever met who was serious about spiritual things thinks the point of the story is true: daily life is the stuff of which high sanctity can be made. But just about nobody I have ever met, however, really thinks it is easily possible. Spirituality, we have all learned somehow, is something I have to leave where I am in order to find it. I get it in small doses, in special places and under rarefied conditions. I hope I get enough at one time in life to carry me through all the other times. The idea that sanctity is as much a part of the married life or the single life as it is of the religious life or the clerical life is an idea dearly loved but seldom deeply believed.
In our own times, too, just as at the time of the story, fads crowd into the spiritual life. We are told that novenas are the answer one year and retreats another and meditation centers a third. True believers tell us that the cult of their choice is the only answer to the struggles of life. The occultists promise salvation in the stars or from ancient oriental lore. The therapeutic community offers marathon encounters or anger-release workshops to cleanse the soul. Over and over again, cures and cults and psychological exercises are regularly tried and regularly discarded while people look for something that will make them feel good, steady their perspective, and bring meaning and direction to their lives. But, as the ancient story demonstrates, if we are not spiritual where we are and as we are, we are not spiritual at all. We are simply consumers of the latest in spiritual gadgetry that numbs our confusions but never fills our spirits or frees our hearts.
After years of monastic life I have discovered that unlike spiritual fads, which come and go with the teachers or cultures that spawned them, the Rule of Benedict looks at the world through interior eyes and lasts. Here, regardless of who we are or what we are, life and purpose meet.
The Rule of Benedict has been a guide to the spiritual life for common people since the sixth century Anything that has lasted that long and had that kind of impact in a throwaway society is certainly worthy of consideration. This book looks at these questions. “How do we account for a way of life that has lasted for over fifteen hundred years, and what, if anything, does it have to say to the spiritual life in our world today?”
Benedictine spirituality offers exactly what our times are lacking. Benedictine spirituality seeks to fill up the emptiness and heal the brokenness in which most of us live in ways that are sensible, humane, whole, and accessible to an overworked, overstimulated, overscheduled human race.
The Rule of Benedict called the class-centered Roman world to community and calls us to the same on a globe that is fragmented. The Rule called for hospitality in times of barbarian invasions and calls us to care in a world of neighborhood strangers. It called for equality in a society full of classes and castes and calls us to equality in a world that proclaims everyone equal but judges everyone differently. Benedict, who challenged the patriarchal society of Rome to humility, challenges our own world, too, whose heroes are Rambo and James Bond, military powers and sports stars, the macho and the violent.
Benedictine spirituality calls for depth in a world given over almost entirely to the superficial and the tinny. It offers a set of attitudes to a world that has been seduced by gimmicks and quick fixes. Benedictine spirituality offers insight and wisdom where pieties have lost meaning and asceticisms have lost favor.
Most of all, Benedictine spirituality is good news for hard times. It teaches p
eople to see the world as good, their needs as legitimate, and human support as necessary. Benedictine spirituality doesn’t call for either great works or great denial. It simply calls for connectedness. It shows us how to connect with God, with others, and with our inmost selves.
All in all, the Rule of Benedict is designed for ordinary people who live ordinary lives. It was not written for priests or mystics or hermits or ascetics; it was written by a layman for laymen. It was written to provide a model of spiritual development for the average person who intends to live life beyond the superficial or the uncaring. It is written for people with deeply spiritual sensibilities and deeply serious concerns who have no intention of setting out to escape their worlds but only to infuse their moral lights with the vision of the Divine.
The Rule of Benedict is wisdom distilled from the daily. This book is simply an account of how I, having lived this Rule in a monastic community for over thirty years, have come to understand the implications of a Benedictine spirituality for our own times.
Spirituality is more than churchgoing. It is possible to go to church and never develop a spirituality at all. Spirituality is the way in which we express a living faith in a real world. Spirituality is the sum total of the attitudes and actions that define our life of faith.
For the apostle Paul, spirituality meant living “in Christ” and seeing the gifts of the Spirit as gifts meant to “build up the Body of Christ” here and now. But understandings of what constituted the perfect Christian life changed from period to period across the ages. It was equated, variously, with martyrdom and withdrawal and evangelization and self-denial. By the period in the church closest to our own, for instance, spirituality had come to mean being obedient to “duly constituted superiors” and able to arouse a great deal of emotional response in private prayer. Spirituality, or “life according to the Spirit,” was measured for many by the number of masses attended or the number of rosaries said or the number of commands accepted with docility or the number and kinds of things that were “given up” in order to lead a higher or more “perfect” life. As a result of those criteria, only nuns, monks, and priests were credited with really being able to live the spiritual life. This understanding persisted until Vatican II with its recognition of the universal call to holiness and the authenticity of the lay vocation in the Church.
We are beginning again, as people did in earlier times, to see the spiritual life through a wider angle lens. The spirituality we develop affects the way we image God, the way we pray, the types of asceticism we practice, the place we give to ministry and community in our definition of “the spiritual life.” It is spirituality that draws us beyond ourselves to find significance and meaning in life. It is our spirituality that defines our life values: self-abnegation or self-development; community or solitude; contemplation or evangelization; personal transformation or social justice; hierarchy or equality. The spirituality we develop, in other words, is the filter through which we view our worlds and the limits within which we operate.
The spirituality that emerges from the Rule of Benedict is a spirituality charged with living the ordinary life extraordinarily well. Here transforming life rather than transcending it is what counts. That’s why the Rule of Benedict is meant for hard-working, busy people whose family lives and bills and civic duties and hard work consume them in this world today as well as for those who have dedicated themselves to living a publicly professed religious life.
The question is, What are the spiritual values enshrined now for nearly fifteen hundred years in the Rule of Benedict and what do they have to say, if anything, to our own age and our own attempts to live calmly in the middle of chaos, productively in an arena of waste, lovingly in a maelstrom of individualism, and gently in a world full of violence? What do they have to say to us who seek answers to the great questions of life while our work overwhelms us and our debts expand, while our families vie for our attention and our friends minimize our concerns, while our politicians tell us that life is getting better when we know that, for many at least, much in life is actually getting worse.
Like the seekers in the story, most of us cannot rush to the sea for distance or fly away to other places for escape. Most of us must simply live where we are, in the midst of the crowds and the complex questions. Most of us have no other access to God and the good life except now, except here. The problem becomes discovering how to make here and now, right and holy for us. The here and now is all we have, any of us, out of which to make life worthwhile and God present and holiness a normal, rather than an unnatural, way of life.
For people like us, Benedictine spirituality is home. Benedictine spirituality deals totally in the here and now. Benedictine spirituality is made out of the raw material of the average daily life. It assumes no great asceticisms and promises no great spiritual feats. It asks for no great physical denials and gives no great mystical guarantees. It describes no specific life work and depends on no great organizational plan. The Rule of Benedict simply takes the dust and clay of every day and turns it into beauty.
The Rule of Benedict is not a set of spiritual exercises and not a set of proscriptions and not a set of devotions and not a set of disciplines. The Rule of Benedict, in fact, is not a rule at all, in the modern sense of that word.
Where “rule” is interpreted to mean controls or laws or demands, the Rule of Benedict does not qualify for that category. On the contrary. The Rule of Benedict is simply a plan of life, a set of principles that is clearly meant to be nearer to the original meaning of the Latin word regula, or guide, than to the concept lex, or law. Law is what we have come to expect from religion; direction is what we need.
Regula, the word now translated to mean “rule,” in the ancient sense meant “guidepost” or “railing,” something to hang on to in the dark, something that leads in a given direction, something that points out the road, something that gives us support as we climb. The Rule of Benedict, in other words, is more wisdom than law. The Rule of Benedict is not a list of directives. The Rule of Benedict is a way of life.
And that’s the key to understanding the Rule. It isn’t one.
That’s why it can be just as important to lay people as it is to monastics. “Listen … whoever you are,” Benedict says in the Prologue to the Rule. Whoever you are.
The Rule of Benedict is simply a piece of Wisdom Literature designed to deal with the great questions of life in ways that make them understandable and present and clear and achievable.
But coming to realize that in both a church and a world that want either all law or no law at all is not easy. Formula and license are so much simpler than steady, steady attention to the quality of life we are creating as well as seeking. It is very difficult when we’re young, in other words, to realize that to get where we want to go in life we must often do things we would not choose to do. To rise early in the morning to pray and read is very foreign thinking to the corporate climber who is sure that what really needs to be done is to store up sleep and conserve strength for the difficult day ahead. To the monastic mentality, though, nothing more sensible can possibly occur. Without the praying and the reading, the monastic believes, who will ever understand what the climbing is meant to reach or the achieving is all about? To halt work for prayer in the middle of a chaotic day seems, to many a young monastic whose work or study is magnetizing and good, to be sheer unreality. But years later it becomes clear that the daily process of stopping to remember what life is really all about at its giddiest peaks may have been the only unvarnished reality of that whole period of life.
It is attention and awareness, in other words, that the Rule of Benedict brings to spirituality. Indeed, the very reason the rule of Benedict is not a rule in the strictest sense of the word is precisely because immersion in life is exactly the point of Benedictine monasticism. Benedictinism is not a prescription frozen in time; it is time brought under the scrutiny of gospel values. The Benedictine does not set out to avoid life; the Benedictine sets out to
live the ordinary life extraordinarily well. As a result, the real monastic is alive to the world.
Monasteries hardly seem like places from which to analyze the world. To go to the monastery, popular mythology has it, is to leave the world, not to get even more deeply involved with it. But it may be only from a distance that we see best. It may be those who do not have money who best know that money is not essential to the good life. It may be those who each have only a bed and books and one closet full of clothes in one small room to call their own who can clearly realize what clutter can do to a life. It may be those who vow obedience to another who can sense what self-centeredness can do to corrode the heart. It may be only those who stand alone in life who can really know what community is all about. It may be those who are powerless by choice who can best demonstrate the power that comes from not having power. It may be those who have decided against amassing personal property who can realize that bankruptcy and welfare and sufficiency are not the worst things that can happen to a person in life. It may be those who are unmarried by choice who can most sensitively hear the abandoned and the widowed and the lonely It may only be those who have no corporate or ecclesial ladder to climb who can best speak to equality. Indeed, the monastery gives a privileged perspective from which to speak to the world.
Once you realize that the text of the Rule of Benedict is only one element of the monastic life it becomes evident that its other three dimensions are very clearly intended to keep a person grounded in the real world. The gospel of Christ, the interpretations of community leaders, and the lived experience and insight of each particular community itself, are as much the Rule as the Rule itself. It is those dimensions that give the Rule life and breadth, depth and scope, antiquity and relevance, local character and universal possibility. Those four elements— the Scriptures, the text of the Rule, wise leaders, and the insight, life experiences, and circumstances of the community or family in which we live—are what make the Rule a living rule and not a dead text of past practices, not a historical document, not the pastime of eccentric antiquarians.
Wisdom Distilled from the Daily Page 1