Wisdom Distilled from the Daily

by Joan Chittister

  Not so long ago, though, a prayer-wheel mentality of the spiritual life was beginning to eat away at monastic communities too. Like the industrialized world around them, where assembly lines had become the model of life’s best operations, the notion that more is better invaded the churches and the monasteries with a vengeance. Novenas followed holy days that followed the seasons of the church, that followed the private devotions that followed the multiplication of Eucharists. We prayed prayers and prayed prayers and prayed prayers.

  To the agricultural culture of time and season, we added the industrial culture of unending shifts and frenzied production. Soon the practice of seven different periods of daily prayer was compounded by a whole range of full-time ministries. And prayer got longer and faster and more mechanical all the time. In a simpler society, Benedict had called for regular prayer punctuated by long periods of sacred reading and equal measures of meaningful work. Our culture, though, turned the spiritual life into a more-is-better world and was fast losing the value of any and all of it.

  Prayer, work, and holy leisure are the three legs that support the spiritual foundation of Benedictinism. Each one is meant to complement the other. Not one of the three is to be abandoned. Prayer makes us conscious of the presence of God, work makes us co-creators of the Kingdom, holy leisure gives us time for the reflective reading of Scripture that makes prayer a real experience rather than the recitation of formulas. Reflective reading of Scripture is what draws me into the text and the text into my life. Like the Chosen People, I discover by plumbing the text, I have been on an exodus of my own and raised my own questions in the face of God and grumbled about my life circumstances and danced in front of idols called my career or my self or my wants. Like Eli I have tolerated evil in the world and never said a word. Like Esther I have convinced myself that I have no responsibility for the destruction of whole peoples by my own government. The Benedictine tradition of lectio, or reflective reading of the sacred books, calls me to take my place among these figures who were called to work out their salvation, as I am, in a world that waits to be reminded by someone of the eternal will of God.

  Benedictine prayer calls for more than prayer time; it calls for attention to the Scriptures. It calls for more than words; it calls for a change of mind and values. It calls for more than ritual; it calls for deep reflection. It calls for more than getting my prayers in; it requires that I get my heart steeped in the story of God in history.

  The prayer life that comes from regularity, reflection, and a sense of the universal, however, is very soon converting. The function of prayer is certainly not to cajole God into saving us from ourselves. “Please, God, don’t let us die in nuclear war” surely is not real prayer. We can stop nuclear war ourselves by stopping the manufacture of nuclear weapons. Humans created them and humans can destroy them. No, the function of prayer is not magic. The function of prayer is not the bribery of the Infinite. The function of prayer is not to change the mind of God about decisions we have already made for ourselves.

  The function of prayer is to change my own mind, to put on the mind of Christ, to enable grace to break into me. When prayer is privatized religion on a spree, it’s not prayer. Contemplative prayer, converting prayer, is prayer that sees the whole world through incense—a holy place, a place where the sacred dwells, a place to be made different by those who pray, a place where God sweetens living with the beauty of all life. Contemplative prayer is prayer that leads us to see our world through the eyes of God. It unstops our ears to hear the poverty of widows, the loneliness of widowers, the cry of women, the vulnerability of children, the struggle of outcasts, the humanity of enemies, the insights of the uneducated, the tensions of bureaucrats, the fears of rulers, the wisdom of the holy, the power of the powerless.

  Prayer leads us and leavens us and enlightens us. And changes us. It makes us something bigger than we are.

  Finally, Benedictine prayer is communal. Benedictine prayer is prayer with a community and for a community and as a community. It is commitment to a pilgrim people whose insights grow with time and whose needs are common to us all. Community prayer in the Benedictine tradition is a constant reminder that we do not go to church for ourselves alone. It is a chosen people, a human race, a body of faithful who stand in witness, first to one another, that God is God. And yet it is not that there is no room for the self here. It is just that the self grows best when self is not its end. To say, “I have a good prayer life, I don’t need to go to church” or “I don’t get anything out of prayer” is to admit our paucity, either on the communal or the personal level.

  In fact, the problem may be that as a church we have done entirely too much with private Eucharists in the immediate past and far too little with common prayer. Gone are the days of parish vespers and parish retreats and parish missions. Individualism has infected even the churches. We find God alone and so we make God in our own image and likeness. And then we make our life decisions in the same way. We do what is good for us, as individuals, as business people, as nations. We even pray for what is good for us and miss the witness and needs of the handicapped and the poor and the disenfranchised and the marginal and the alienated and the lonely.

  But community prayer is meant to bind us to one another and to broaden our vision of the needs of the world and to give us models to steer by and friends to uphold us and encourage us and enable us to go on. The praying community becomes the vehicle for my own fidelity. Because they are there praying, I go to prayer. Because they are there always, I make room in my life for them and for God. Because they are there consistently, I can never put them and their witness and their needs out of my mind. Private prayer, Benedict says, may follow communal prayer, but it can never substitute for it. Prayer, in fact, forms the community mind.

  The implications of all these qualities for contemporary spirituality are plain:

  God is to be dialogued with in the Word daily—not simply attended to at times of emotional spasm— until little by little the gospel begins to work in me. Prayer must be scriptural, not simply personal.

  Time for prayer must be set aside and kept: after the children go to school; before breakfast in the morning; in the car on the way to work; on the bus coming home; at night before going to bed.

  Reflection on the Scriptures is basic to growth in prayer and to growth as a person. Prayer is a process of coming to be something new. It is not simply a series of exercises.

  Understanding is essential to the act of prayer. Formulas are not enough.

  Changes in attitudes and behaviors are a direct outcome of prayer. Anything else is more therapeutic massage than confrontation with God.

  A sense of community is both the bedrock and the culmination of prayer. I pray to become a better human being, not to become better at praying.

  “There are three stages of spiritual development,” a teacher taught. “The carnal, the spiritual, and the divine.”

  “What is the carnal stage?” the disciple asked.

  “That’s the stage,” the teacher said, “when trees are seen as trees and mountains are seen as mountains.”

  “And the spiritual?” the disciple asked eagerly.

  “That’s when we look more deeply into things. Then trees are no longer trees and mountains are no longer mountains,” the teacher answered.

  “And the divine?” the disciple said breathlessly.

  “Ah,” the teacher said with a smile. “That’s Enlightenment—when the trees become trees again and the mountains become mountains.”

  We pray to see life as it is, to understand it, and to make it better than it was. We pray so that reality can break into our souls and give us back our awareness of the Divine Presence in life. We pray to understand things as they are, not to ignore and avoid and deny them.

  We pray so that when the incense disappears we can still see the world as holy.

  4

  Community: The Basis of Human Relationships

  This, then, is the good zeal whi
ch monastics must foster with fervent love: “They should each try to be the first to show respect to the other” (Rom. 12:10), supporting with the greatest patience one another’s weakness of body or behavior, and earnestly competing in obedience to one another. No one is to pursue what is judged better for self, but instead what is judged better for someone else. To their companions they show the pure love of sisters or brothers; to God, loving fear; to their abbot, unfeigned and humble love. Let them prefer nothing whatever to Christ, and may Christ bring us all together to everlasting life.

  RB 72:3-11

  There are icons of Benedict and Scholastica that hang in the chapel foyer of our monastery. There are oil paintings and wood mosaics of them in every hall and public room. There are statues of them in the library and on the lawn facing the road that runs along the property outside. They are everywhere. And every one of those figures, no matter what the medium, says just one thing to me about them: Human. Very human.

  For all the centuries of art that have depicted them, the portraitures of Benedict and Scholastica have been saved somehow from the distortions of romanticism. They are not bigger than life. They are not set in shining halos. They are not surrounded by angels. Only one characteristic outdoes the rest: they both have piercing eyes.

  Sight and humanity are, I think, the basic gifts of Benedictine community. The ability to see is both a strength and a weakness. If we learn to see life as it is instead of as we want it to be, we have an edge on happiness. More likely, though, we set out to shape life according to our own image and likeness.

  The Rule of Benedict simply laughs at the idea. Benedict doesn’t set up a model of rarefied existence as the end of the spiritual life. Benedict sets up a community, a family. And families, the honest among us will admit, are risky places to be if perfection is what you are expecting in life.

  Of all the places where the Rule of Benedict departs from the traditional norms of religious life, it is surely in its theology of community. And of all the places where the Rule of Benedict shows us the real depth of the spiritual life, it is surely in its theology of community. “The most valiant kind of monk,” Benedict writes in a culture of hermits, is not the solitary or the pseudoascetic or the wandering beggar but “the cenobite” (RB 1:12), the one who has learned to live with others in community. In fact, the gift of Benedictine spirituality to the modern world may well be community itself.

  The desert ascetics before him had been disciplined, other-worldly solitaries whose sole work of life was concentration on God. Benedictine monastics, on the other hand, were ordinary people whose whole work of life was concentration on God and service to one another. But who doesn’t know after a long, hard day of meeting people and listening to people and cleaning up after people how inviting a desert can be. In the desert surely, God would talk directly to us. In the community, God speaks too, but only through the others. Ah, yes, people say, I would love to go to a monastery to get away from this mortgage and this wild child and this pressure and this sloppy wife and this demanding husband and this corporate rat race and these sponging relatives. Hold it. Not so fast. The monastery will not offer an escape from all of this, but it might offer a model for dealing with them.

  Exactly what do the eyes of Benedict and Scholastica see when they look at the human community? First, the Rule is clear: love costs. It costs the little daily things— serving the meals, providing the needs, asking for favors nicely, refusing favors gently. Second, love makes demands. It demands that we use our gifts for our own communities as well as for others. It demands that we make relationships a priority. It demands that we make community for others. It demands that we share ourselves, our minds, our insights, and our time with one another. Most of all, it demands that we allow the people in our lives to be who they are and grow as they can.

  Community is the only antidote we have to an individualism that is fast approaching the heights of the pathological and the sinful in this world. Folk literature gives us a very insightful glimpse of a growing world problem. In the Far East there is a traditional image of the difference between heaven and hell. In hell, the ancients said, people have chopsticks one yard long so they cannot possibly reach their mouths. In heaven, the chopsticks are also one yard long—but, in heaven, the people feed one another.

  It is not a case, in other words, of what we have in life. It is a case of what we do with it that determines the quality of the communal life we lead.

  Benedictine spirituality is intent on the distribution of self for the sake of the other. But it is intent as well on the presence of the other for my sake as well.

  In this model of life, unlike the standard-brand American dream, it isn’t that every person in a family has a car that makes or breaks good family life. It is a matter of how the cars they do have are shared among them that measures the health and love of that group. In this vision of life, it isn’t that women in a family pour themselves out for their families and friends, their neighborhoods and nations; it is that not only the women be expected to pour themselves out if real family, real community, real relationships are to be achieved. In this schema, it isn’t only the man of the family who works to support it, but everyone is expected to contribute to the health and future of the group.

  Indeed, the vision of human community that shines in the eyes of the icons of Benedict and Scholastica is a very different model from the one we see around us in our culture today. There are qualities common to community life in the Rule of Benedict that are sadly missing from modern society. And in their stead we reap alienation and self-centeredness and calculated cosmic ruin.

  The Benedictine spirituality of community is based on life with other persons in the spirit of Christ: to support them, to empower them, and to learn from them. The radical monastic testimony of this commitment to universal human love is celibacy, the public declaration that the monastic will belong to everyone and to no one at the same time. Celibacy says that human community is built on a great deal more than the sexual, that it transcends sexual love, and pours itself out with no expectation of outpouring in return. Community, the Rule reminds us, is to be built on “chaste” love, on love that does not use or exploit the other, on love that can give without requiring equal payment in return, on love that is not based on the gratification of the self And that is exactly why the Benedictine spirituality of community is not for celibates alone.

  In a culture in which sex has become a consuming issue, a national passion, an underlying current in every social stream, Benedictine spirituality calls for love in breadth and love in depth and love in human, rather than simply sexual, terms. The spirituality of celibacy says that each of us is whole before God, that God has absolute priority for us, that God is sufficient for us, and that God’s demands over our lives are total. The married, the single, and the monastic all have this same call to ultimate aloneness and ultimate union with God, and eventually every life will bow to it. Monastics only draw the call in clearer, broader, bolder lines here so the whole world can see its reality.

  Interestingly enough, though, even in monasticism celibacy has often been reduced to the sexual. As a young woman in community, I was not even permitted to ride in the front seat of the car when I was alone with my father. Old spiritual reading books counseled us not to pick up small children so that we wouldn’t jeopardize our vocations. We concentrated more on keeping our distance than on widening our grasp on the world. Real monastic celibacy, though, is human love that points to a greater love. Real monastic celibacy challenges the sexual chaos of our time to something beyond the sensual that ebbs and flows throughout our time to the spiritual that lasts forever. To live totally in God and totally for others can be a counterweight of value to an extremely self-centered world.

  Benedict’s spirituality of community is based first of all on bondedness in Christ. Neither communities nor families exist for themselves alone. They exist to witness to Christ and in Christ. They exist to be miracle worker to one another. They exist to make
the world the family it is meant to be. Their purpose is to draw us always into the center of life where values count and meaning matters more than our careers or our personal convenience.

  The fact is that simply living with people does not by itself create community. People live together in armies and prisons and college dormitories and hospitals, but they are not communities unless they live out of the same reservoir of values and the same center of love. Marrying the rich husband or the proper wife, going to religious life to avoid responsibility rather than to respond to it has nothing to do with bondedness in Christ. We have to share a common vision. We have to want good for one another. We have to be able to draw from the same well together. “Let us open our eyes to the light that comes from God, and our ears to the voice from heaven,” the Rule says (RB Prologue:9).

  So, even liking one another is not enough. The truth about Christian community is that we have to be committed to the same eternal things together. What we want to live for and how we intend to live out those values are the central questions of community. Without that understanding, communities fail and marriages dissolve and people leave religious life and nations go to war.

  Another function of community is to enable us to be about something greater than ourselves. It is no small task in a world that tells us constantly that we ourselves are enough to be concerned about and that everything else will take care of itself. Well, that kind of enlightened altruism has not saved us from the destruction of the ozone layer, or the deterioration of the centers of our cities, or massive unemployment even among educated upper-middle-class executives, or wars against the innocent on every front.

  The truth is that, as a people, we simply have not cultivated in our time the spiritual commitment to pay attention to life beyond our own backyards. We take care of us and nothing else because no greater vision of life impels us and because we lack the sense of human community that requires us to be for others. Every ad agency in the country sells us personal satisfaction, not group growth. We learn early to do our own thing. We discover very young in this culture to look out for “ol’ number one.” The notion of doing something because it benefits others sells very little in this world.