Wisdom Distilled from the Daily

by Joan Chittister

  Until I learn to listen—to the Scriptures, to those around me, to my own underlying life messages, to the wisdom of those who have already maneuvered successfully around the dangers of a life that is unmotivated and unmeaningful—I will really have nothing whatever to say about life myself. To live without listening is not to live at all; it is simply to drift in my own backwater.

  Listening is, indeed, a fundamental value of Benedictine spirituality. More than that, Benedictine listening is life lived in stereo. The simple fact is that everybody lives listening to something. But few live a life attuned on every level. Benedictine spirituality doesn’t allow for selective perception; it insists on breadth, on a full range of hearing, on total alert. We have to learn to hear on every level at once if we are really to become whole. The problem is that most of us are deaf in at least one ear.

  We have to learn to listen to Scripture. And we have to learn to listen to life around us.

  Scripture, the Rule insists, must be read daily. How can we hear the voice of God if we are not familiar with it? How can we recognize the ways of God if we have never seen them? How can we discover the will of God in our own lives if we have never traced its clear but jagged paths in the lives of the chosen weak before us? Indeed, Scripture is basic to a Benedictine life, but it is just as important to hear God’s voice in the world around us. And there, perhaps, is the real test of the listening heart. It does not take much to hear in our own language. What takes sanctity is to be able to hear in the tongue of the other.

  People in positions of authority know they aren’t being heard if the people they are trying to direct turn every conversation into an adolescent struggle with the ghosts of their parents.

  The poor know that the rich cannot hear them because success has deafened them. The rich cannot hear the voices of those unable to get the cleaning or the ditch-digging or the dishwashing jobs that people of past generations took for granted in their climb to the top.

  Women know that men don’t hear or take seriously their concerns for children or education or independence or equal wages and full human options.

  The isolated elderly know that power talks and they no longer have it.

  Families soon discover whose voice carries weight, whose will is sacred in the house, who does not listen and who will not respond.

  The lonely know that no one is listening to their need for love and laughter.

  The Church knows that worship has become more a duty than a dialogue for some, more therapeutic than prophetic for others.

  Our entire generation has gone deaf. Scripture and wisdom and relationships and personal experience are all being ignored. We are, consequently, a generation of four wars and of the most massive arms buildup in the history of the world—in a period called peacetime. We are a generation of great poverty in the midst of great wealth, of great loneliness in the center of great communities; of serious personal breakdowns and community deterioration in the face of unparalleled social growth; of great spiritual ennui in the middle of our great claims of being a God-fearing country.

  Into the midst of all this indistinguishable cacophony of life, the bell tower of every Benedictine monastery rings “listen.” Listen with the heart of Christ. Listen with the lover’s ear. Listen for the voice of God. Listen in your own heart for the sound of truth, the kind that comes when a piece of quality crystal is struck by a metal rod.

  The problem is, perhaps, that most of us don’t even know what listening involves. But the Rule tells us clearly.

  First, Benedict requires that everything must be done with counsel. Benedictine spirituality has no room for arrogance elevated to the level of inspiration. To cultivate a monastic mentality, we must seek counsel, take advice, listen to the opinion of others on subjects dear to us. Reflection becomes integral to the process of growth and basic to our style of acting. Impulsiveness becomes suspect even when the impulsive decision turns out to be right. Why? Because truth is a mosaic of the face of God. Because the voice of God comes often from where we would least expect it, like a burning bush or a stranger or a dream or a messenger from afar or a prophet of the court. And we must be listening for it.

  Second, Benedict teaches, life is a learning process. Western culture and its emphasis on academic degrees, however, has almost smothered this truth. We have made the words “graduation” and “education” almost synonymous. We measure achievement in academic credits. We discount experience, depth, and failure. We believe in action and results and products and profit and youth, so we come to regard the elderly as essentially useless.

  But, in the end, all of that kind of achievement is nothing but a spiritual wasteland if along the way we have not attached ourselves to the discovery of truth, the cultivation of beauty, and the recognition of the real learnings of life.

  Benedictine spirituality is, then, the spirituality of the open heart. A willingness to be touched. A sense of otherness. There is no room here for isolated splendor or self-sufficiency. Here all of life becomes a teacher and we its students. Here certification alone does not count as qualification. The listener can always learn and turn and begin again. The open can always be filled. The real disciple can always be surprised by God. “Listen with the ear of the heart” (RB Prologue:!), the Rule instructs.

  But once I become my own message there is nothing else to hear. No way to grow. No chance to change. Nothing but echoes of my own voice.

  At one point in the monastic life, I was sure that knowing the Rule and practicing its practices was the secret of the holy life. Now I know that knowing the document will never suffice for listening to the voice of God, wherever it may be found. No longer do I hope that someday, somehow, I will have accumulated enough listening so that there will be no further questions about pious practices that can easily be learned. Now I have only a burning commitment to those qualities of the spiritual life that must be learned if I am to grow.

  Once upon a time, an ancient story tells, there was a seeker who had heard of the Fruit of Heaven and who coveted it.

  The seeker asked a teacher, “How can I find this fruit, so that I may attain to immediate knowledge?”

  “You would be best advised to study with me,” the Teacher said. “If you will not do that, you will have to travel resolutely and at times restlessly throughout the world.”

  “Surely,” the seeker thought, “there is a more effective way than that.” And so the seeker left that teacher and found another and another and another and many more.

  The seeker passed thirty years in the search. Finally the seeker came to a garden. There in the middle of it stood the Tree of Heaven and from its branches hung the bright Fruit of Heaven.

  And there, standing beside the Tree, was the first teacher.

  “Why did you not tell me when we first met that you your self were the Custodian of the Fruit of Heaven?” the seeker asked.

  “Because,” the Teacher said, “you would not have believed me then. And besides, this tree produces fruit only once every thirty years and thirty days.”

  There is no quick and easy way to make the life of God the life we lead. It takes years of sacred reading, years of listening to all of life, years of learning to listen through the filter of what we have read. A generation of Pop Tarts and instant cocoa and TV dinners and computer calculations and Xerox copies does not prepare us for the slow and tedious task of listening and learning, over and over, day after day, until we can finally hear the people we love and love the people we’ve learned to dislike and grow to understand how holiness is here and now for us. But someday, in thirty years and thirty days perhaps, we may have listened enough to be ready to gather the yield that comes from years of learning Christ in time, or at least, in the words of the Rule of Benedict, to have made “a good beginning.”

  Until then, the monastery bells ring out patiently, patiently to remind us to listen. Just listen. Keep listening.

  3

  Prayer and Lectio: The Center and Centrifuge of Life


  Whenever we want to ask some favor of a powerful person, we do it humbly and respectfully, for fear of presumption. How much more important, then, to lay our petitions before the God of all things with the utmost humility and sincere devotion. We must know that God regards our purity of heart and tears of compunction, not our many words. Prayer should, therefore, be short and pure, unless perhaps it is prolonged under the inspiration of divine grace.

  RB 20:1-4

  On the vigils of Sundays and great feasts, our monastery chapel fills with incense as the community prays. The incense wraps around the acolyte who carries it ceremoniously down the aisle as Vespers begins. It pours out of the censer at the base of the altar during the recitation of the Psalms. It wafts around the candles during the reading of the Scripture. By the end of the prayer, it disappears quietly into the cathedral ceiling above and by the time the community has come to the chanting of the “Magnificat,” the aura has disappeared entirely. Hardly the scent remains. Whatever it was all intended for, apparently, done. Finished. Gone.

  And what was all that incense about? Not mystification surely: the chapel is the chapel, incense or no incense. Not heat: the coals that heat the incense do no more than heat the incense itself. Not antiquity: we have created too modern a setting to let ourselves be fooled that we are functioning in the same style and environment as monastics fifteen centuries before us. No, clearly, the incense on feast days and Sundays must be meant to do something else.

  The incense that drenches the community in a filmy heaviness once a week is another kind of reminder of the other-sidedness of prayer. Prayer, the incense says, is not an exercise in recitation. Prayer is the filter through which we view our worlds. Prayer provokes us to see the life around us in fresh, new ways. Prayer is what is left of life after the incense has disappeared. Ancient monastics put it this way:

  “Help us to find God,” the disciples asked the elder.

  “No one can help you do that,” the elder said.

  “Why not?” the disciples asked amazed.

  “For the same reason that no one can help fish to find the ocean.”

  Benedictine prayer is not designed to take people out of the world to find God. Benedictine prayer is designed to enable people to realize that God is in the world around them.

  Like the incense in the monastic chapel, prayer is meant to call us back to a consciousness of God here and now, not to make God some kind of private getaway from life. On the contrary. Prayer in the Benedictine tradition is a community act and an act of community awareness.

  Benedictine prayer, rooted in the Psalms and other Scriptures, takes us out of ourselves to form in us a larger vision of life than we ourselves can ever dredge up out of our own lives alone. Benedictine prayer puts us in contact with past and future at once so that the present becomes clearer and the future possible.

  When I was a young monastic, I found prayer a long boring interruption of life. It was not anything the spiritual books and biographies of the period promised it would be. It was not sweet. It did not give me personal consolation. It simply cluttered the day with annoying distractions. Surely my work with students was more important than running in and out of chapel for group recitations of prayers that had nothing whatsoever to do with me or what I was doing at the time. Where were the lights? Where were the insights? Where were the lovely visions of God reported by the saints, assumed by the public, and expected by the spiritually immature? Little by little, I learned.

  Benedictine prayer has several characteristics that make more for a spirituality of awareness than of consolation. It is regular. It is universal. It is converting. It is reflective. And it is communal. Out of those qualities a whole new life emerges and people are changed. Not in the way tornadoes change things, perhaps, but in the way that the sand in oysters does.

  Prayer that is regular confounds both self-importance and the wiles of the world. It is so easy for good people to confuse their own work with the work of creation. It is so easy to come to believe that what we do is so much more important than what we are. It is so easy to simply get too busy to grow. It is so easy to commit ourselves to this century’s demand for product and action until the product consumes us and the actions exhaust us and we can no longer even remember why we set out to do them in the first place.

  But regularity in prayer cures all that. Regularity harnesses us to our place in the universe. Morning and evening, season by season, year after year we watch the sun rise and set, death and resurrection daily come and go, beginnings and endings follow one another without terror and without woe. We come to realize that we are simply small parts of a continuing creation, and we take hope and comfort and perspective from that. If getting this contract is all that the world is about; if washing the children’s school clothes is the center and the acme of my life; if holding this meeting or getting this promotion or making this money is all that claims my whole life’s concentration and fills my whole life’s time, then I have become more of a thing than a person and life is really passing me by. Or, I am passing it by.

  Benedict called for prayer at regular intervals of each day, right in the middle of apparently urgent and important work. The message is unequivocal. Let no one forget what they are really about. Let no one forget why they have really come to this life. Let no one forget the purpose of life. Let no one forget to remember. Ever. Benedictine spirituality is not a spirituality of escape; Benedictine spirituality is a spirituality that fills time with an awareness of the presence of God.

  “Pray always,” Scripture says. “Prefer nothing whatsoever to the Work of God” (RB 43:3), the Rule insists. “Impossible,” we object. And yet, if we keep our souls tied to a consciousness of God as the Rule directs, even in the face of things of apparently greater or more immediate value, then consciousness of God becomes a given. And consciousness of God is perpetual prayer.

  To pray in the midst of the mundane is simply and strongly to assert that this dull and tiring day is holy and its simple labors are the stuff of God’s saving presence for me now. To pray simply because it is prayer time is no small act of immersion in the God who is willing to wait for us to be conscious, to be ready, to be willing to become new in life.

  Prayer, Benedictine spirituality demonstrates, is not a matter of mood. To pray only when we feel like it is more to seek consolation than to risk conversion. To pray only when it suits us is to want God on our terms. To pray only when it is convenient is to make the God-life a very low priority in a list of better opportunities. To pray only when it feels good is to court total emptiness when we most need to be filled. The hard fact is that nobody finds time for prayer. The time must be taken. There will always be something more pressing to do, something more important to be about than the apparently fruitless, empty act of prayer. But when that attitude takes over, we have begun the last trip down a very short road because, without prayer, the energy for the rest of life runs down. The fuel runs out. We become our own worst enemies: we call ourselves too tired and too busy to pray when, in reality, we are too tired and too busy not to pray Eventually, the burdens of the day wear us down and we no longer remember why we decided to do what we’re doing: work for this project, marry this woman, have these children, minister in this place. And if I cannot remember why I decided to do this, I cannot figure out how I can go on with it. I am tired and the vision just gets dimmer and dimmer.

  To pray when we cannot, on the other hand, is to let God be our prayer. The spirituality of regularity requires that we turn over our bruised and bleeding and fragmented and distracted selves to the possibility of conversion, in memory and in hope, in good times and in bad, day after day after day, morning and night, this year and next.

  But regularity is not the only call to otherness in Benedictine prayer. Just as the incense drifts out of our hands at solemn vespers so does the notion of prayer as personal panacea disappear quickly once we have lived a Benedictine spirituality for awhile. Benedictine prayer is based almost totally in the Psa
lms and in the Scriptures. “Let us set out on this way,” the Rule reads, “with the Gospel as our guide” (RB Prologue:9). Benedictine prayer, consequently, is not centered in the needs and wants and insights of the person who is praying. It is anchored in the needs and wants and insights of the entire universe. Benedictine prayer pries me out of myself and stretches me beyond myself so that I can come someday, perhaps, to be my best self.

  The Scriptures call us to put on the mind of Christ. The Psalms pray out of the struggles of the Psalmist in search of God, out of the struggles of a people in search of life, and out of a consciousness of the cosmic and the universal. Praying the Psalms and the Scriptures, I see with the eyes of Christ, celebrate God in creation, grapple with my own emotional immaturity as the Psalmist did, insert myself into the struggles of the whole people of God.

  Under this bright light of broadened human consciousness, I come to realize I am not the center of the universe but I am cut from its cloth and subject to its struggles and promised its promises. I learn that prayer expands my horizons, not enwombs them. I find I bring to the microscope of prayer not simply the mood of the moment but the whole life task of becoming fully human. A Benedictine spirituality that is rooted in the Scriptures plunges a person into the feelings and forces of the entire cosmos and brings us up bigger than ourselves.

  Benedictine prayer life, besides being scriptural and regular, is reflective. It is designed to make us take our own lives into account in the light of the gospel. It is not recitation for its own sake. It is the bringing to bear of the mind of Christ on the fragments of our own lives. It requires steady wrestling with the Word of God. It takes time and it does not depend on quantity for its value.