Wisdom Distilled from the Daily

by Joan Chittister

  Into this milieu, Benedictine spirituality inserts a consciousness of life together in Christ, not simply life that is convenient for me. Those who look to a spirit of Benedictine community life as a model for their own must be grounded in Christ and intent on becoming a sign of the power of Christian community to others.

  It isn’t that members of a Benedictine community don’t have lives of their own. It is simply that to the monastic, life without the others is only half a life. Life without the community of faith leaves us without a sense of more than us in life, and that is a barren life at best. When we transcend ourselves for the other, though, community becomes the sacrament of human fulfillment and purpose in life.

  A Benedictine spirituality of community, therefore, has a reverence for uniqueness as well as bondedness. Conformity is not the end of Benedictine life; it is community of heart and soul and mind toward which we move, not control. But to understand that is to free us from having to control everyone in our world and it is to free them from enslavement to our egos.

  Possessiveness goes when uniqueness in community-is understood. We begin to realize that the gift of the individuals in our lives must be given as God gave them, freely and recklessly. We begin to realize that we don’t have the master plan for everybody else’s life. We begin to see that children must be allowed to go their own way and that husbands have to be allowed to make their dreams come true instead of simply making their bank accounts bigger and wives must be permitted to become gifted people themselves instead of simply being the family’s live-in help.

  We begin to learn to trust our own gifts, too, but not for their own sake. We develop our gifts in the Benedictine tradition when we use them for the good of others. Let the artists work at their crafts, the Rule says, “and let them sell their goods for less” (RB 57:8). Our gifts are to be given away so that the whole human community is richer for our having been here.

  In Benedictine spirituality, community is a very human thing. We do not expect perfection here, but we do expect growth, in ourselves as well as in others. Here everyone holds a privileged place, whatever their place. In Benedict’s community, slave and free were equals; priests and lay were equals; old and young were equals. Each had a say and each gifts and each had needs and each had obligations to the others.

  In a mentality of family equality, fathers do not have a right to rage at their families and children do not have a right to tyrannize the household and mothers do not have a right to withhold their mothering on the grounds that they are people too. But each of them does have a right to be listened to and given help when life’s tasks are too much for them to manage without help. “Let help be given where it is needed” (RB 53:20), the Rule instructs. The function of family, in other words, is not to establish roles. The function of family is to establish the family

  Community goes astray, consequently, when it begins to be seen simply as a jumping-off point for our own personal ambitions instead of an arena in which I am meant to give my gifts to the rest of the human race so that we can all live better together. When I begin to think that my community owes me this or my family doesn’t love me unless they give me that, or my friends have to change their plans for mine, then I am clearly intent on creating a world unto myself, not a community. When her career and his ambitions and their laziness become the pivot around which these relationships begin to operate, we don’t have community at all. We have a privatization of the Garden of Eden.

  It was the sight of everybody, old and young, sophisticated and simple, administrators and staff, scrubbing woodwork and sweeping steps and washing walls that most affected me as a young monastic. It is the sight of everyone taking a turn at table-waiting at community meals and everyone at choir practice and everyone doing dishes and everyone setting up the dining room tables for great feast days and everyone doing the Christmas decorating together and everyone packing boxes for the community giveaway days that most makes me realize that we are all in this together Then I know in a special way that I am not alone. Then I realize with new insight that there are basics in life more important than a business schedule. Then I understand that those basics are love of God and fun and companionship on the long, dark roads of life and partnership in the great human enterprise. We have to learn to be for one another so that the love of God is a shining certainty, even now, even here. That is the function and the blessing of community And it is a far cry from the rugged individualism, the narcissism, and the brutal independence that has become the insulation in our neighborhoods and the hallmark of our culture.

  Finally, the Benedictine spirituality of community depends on stability, on seeing things through, on working things out, on going on. Everything in life, contrary to Madison Avenue’s guarantees, can’t be cured or resolved or eliminated. Some things must simply be endured. Some things must simply be borne. Some things must simply be accepted. Community and relationships enable us to do that. Community and relationships are meant to hold us up on the days when we are very, very down.

  In community we work out our connectedness to God, to one another, and to ourselves. It is in community where we find out who we really are. It is life with another that shows my impatience and life with another that demonstrates my possessiveness and life with another that gives notice to my nagging devotion to the self. Life with someone else, in other words, doesn’t show me nearly as much about his or her shortcomings as it does about my own. In human relationships I learn how to soften my hard spots and how to reconcile and how to care for someone else besides myself. In human relationships I learn that theory is no substitute for love. It is easy to talk about the love of God; it is another thing to practice it.

  That’s how relationships sanctify me. They show me where holiness is for me. That’s how relationships develop me. They show me where growth is for me. If I’m the passive-victim type, then assertiveness may have something to do with coming to wholeness. If I’m the domineering character in every group, then a willingness to listen and to be led may be my call to life. Alone, I am what I am, but in community I have the chance to become everything that I can be.

  And so, stability bonds me to this group of people and to these relationships so that resting in the security of each other we can afford to stumble and search, knowing that we will be caught if we fall and we will be led where we cannot see by those who have been there before us. In a Benedictine community, all ages live side by side, the young with the old, the well with the infirm, and each learns from the other. The elderly learn from the young that life goes on, that creation keeps creating. The young learn from the elderly that life is about more than titles and careers, that someday we shall each be only what we are and no more. Then, we will all look back on our relationships with God, with our selves, and with others as the only lasting mark of our humanity.

  “Whose feet shall the hermit wash?” Basil, from whom Benedict drew much of his own inspiration, asked centuries ago. The question needs to be asked again in a culture devoted largely to the worship of itself. Unless we learn in our own personal relationships, as the ancient definition of heaven and hell indicates, to live for someone besides ourselves, how shall we as a nation ever learn to hear the cries of the starving in Ethiopia and the illiterate in Africa and the refugees in the Middle East and the war weary in Central America? What will become of a nation in this day and age that has no sense of community? What, indeed, will become of the planet? The warning of the wise is clear:

  “In hell,” the Vietnamese write, “the people have chopsticks but they are three feet long so that they cannot reach their mouths. In Heaven the chopsticks are the same length, but in heaven the people feed one another.” The message is no less new, no less important today.

  The very human, very piercing eyes of Benedict and Scholastica see all of that and leave us with life-giving choices to make. Community is our only option.

  5

  Humility: The Lost Virtue

  [I]f we want to reach the highest summit of humi
lity, if we desire to attain speedily that exaltation in heaven to which we climb by the humility of this present life, then by our ascending actions we must set up that ladder on which Jacob in a dream saw “angels descending and ascending” (Gen. 28:12). Without doubt, this descent and ascent can signify only that we descend by exaltation and ascend by humility. Now the ladder erected is our life on earth, and, it we humble our hearts, God will raise it to heaven. We may call our body and soul the sides of this ladder, into which our divine vocation has fitted the various steps of humility and discipline as we ascend.

  RD 7:9-10

  One of the most interesting spots in our monastery is its inner courtyard. Exotic flowers grow there in every season and very few people notice them. Most of the windows that border the courtyard belong to private workspaces. The few public vantage points are in narrow corridors where people need to keep moving by rather than being able to gather and look. Yet, the courtyard is one of the most life-giving places we have. It gives light to the inside of the monastery. It breeds beauty. Much like a Japanese garden, it centers the house in peace. And everybody knows it. And few people see it. But without it the house would be a completely different place.

  Benedict does that with his chapter on humility. He places it inconspicuously in the center of the Rule, and it leavens the entire document, the entire way of life.

  Humility is not an easy thing to talk about in the twentieth century. Nor was it in the sixth century, I’m sure. Patriarchy was an institution of divine right. Slave and free were sharply divided. Roman citizenship was the passport to the good life. There was no room for humility here and little tolerance for it either.

  In our own generation, humility has at best been labeled neurotic. It is self-esteem and personal growth and getting ahead that we’re all about. If humility has something to do with being passive, meek, and self-effacing, those are not qualities that we call healthy, let alone smart. And I admit that humility as it has been presented has certainly left things to be desired.

  In our novitiate, humility was interpreted as not being noticed, not speaking up, not questioning the questionable, not advancing our own gifts. We were not, after all, too far away yet from the age when the watering of sticks was used to prove the monastic’s ability to take ridiculous orders without arrogant resistance. I never did understand all that too well. The people I knew and admired most were all very effective people who knew it and who kept getting better at it. I was convinced, moreover, that they were also humble. I just couldn’t say, though, how I knew that to be so. Then I studied the Rule.

  The twentieth century has plenty to relearn about humility and the Rule of Benedict may be its best model. Benedict identifies twelve degrees of humility, twelve levels of personal growth that lead to peace. They lead to other things too. They lead to self-development and they lead to community consciousness. Like our courtyard, they permeate all of life, quietly and unobtrusively and totally. The fact is that everyone has something that controls his or her entire life. For some, it’s ambition; for some, it’s greed; for some, it’s dependence; for some, it’s fear; for some, it’s self-centeredness. Benedict wants us to permeate our lives with reality. Monastics of another age put it this way:

  One day the Teacher said, “It is so much easier to travel than to stop.”

  “Why?” the disciples demanded to know.

  “Because,” the Teacher said, “as long as you travel to a goal you can hold on to a dream. When you stop, you must face reality.”

  “But how shall we ever change if we have no goals or dreams?” the disciples asked.

  “Change that is real is change that is not willed. Face reality and unwilled change will happen.”

  Humility is reality to the full.

  Benedict couches his teachings on humility in six basic principles. With these understandings it is clear that Benedict’s definition of humility and the use of the term in the twentieth century are light years apart.

  In the first place, Benedictine spirituality implies, the presence of God demands total response. If I really believe God is present in my life, here and now, then I have no choice but to deal with that. Life, in fact, will not be resolved for me until I do. No manner of other agendas will ever completely smother the insistency of the God one. No amount of noise will ever successfully drown out the need to discover what is most important among all the important things of life. No degree of success will ever feel like success until I am succeeding at the center point of life.

  Second, the Rule makes clear, the pride that is the opposite of humility is not the excitement that comes with doing well what I do best. The pride that is the opposite of monastic humility is the desire to be my own God and to control other people and other things. It is not pride to enjoy my achievements. That kind of awareness is the spirit of the “Magnificat” at its height. It is pride to want to wrench my world and all the people in it to my ends. It is arrogance to the utmost to insist that other people shape their lives to make mine comfortable. It is arrogance unabashed to think that God must do the same.

  The third basic principle of monastic humility is that spiritual development is a process. If the spirituality of the immediate past is tainted by anything at all, it is the notion that growth is an event. People who graduated from high school were considered grown-up. People who got married were said to be grown-up. People who became parents were automatically grown-up. People who went to monasteries and seminaries were undoubtedly grown-up. And we treated the spiritual life the same way. We put people through a series of spiritual gymnastics and assumed if they did certain things certain ways, that in itself was proof of spiritual progress. To walk with downcast eyes was prayerful. To climb up the cathedral steps on your knees, I had been told as a child, was a sign of repentance. To take the last place in line if you were a priest was humble. But nothing is more insidious than spiritual pride; nothing is more impervious to identification. No, the monastic mind-set says, spiritual development is not an event. Spiritual development is a process of continuing conversion. “What do you do in the monastery?” an ancient tale asks. “Oh, we fall and we get up. We fall and we get up,” the old monastic answers. In monastic spirituality, we never arrive; we are always arriving.

  In Benedictine spirituality too, humility and humiliations are two distinct concepts, and they are not necessarily related. The Rule does not call for humiliations. The Rule calls for the humility it would take to deal with the humiliating aspects of life and come out of them psychologically well and spiritually sound. It is possible, in other words, to live our whole life in a series of humiliations and know nothing about humility. Humiliation may teach us a lot about oppression, or a lot about underdevelopment or a great deal about anger, but it will not necessarily prove that we have learned anything about humility Benedictine humility frees the spirit; it does not batter it.

  Humility, the Rule implies, is the glue of our relationships. Humility is the foundation of community and family and friendship and love. Humility comes from understanding my place in the universe.

  Finally, the Rule shows us, self-love is destructive of self. If we allow an unwarranted, unlimited kind of self-concern to consume us, our very mental health is in question.

  In 1980, so corrosive had the effects of exaggerated self-importance become that the American Psychiatric Association began to identify narcissism as a personality disorder. Clearly, the cultural effects of rampant individualism have come home to haunt us. The symptoms of narcissism, the professionals agree, that are signs of an unintegrated personality include a grandiose and exaggerated sense of self-importance; preoccupation with fantasies of success; exhibitionism and insatiable attention-getting maneuvers; disdain or disproportionate rage in the face of criticism; a sense of entitlement that undermines any hope for success in personal relationships; talk that is more self-promotion than communication (Millon, Theodore. Disorders of Personality. New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1981). The Rule of Benedict reads like a therapeutic
regimen against the illness.

  In a culture where the individual is always considered more important than the group and family tensions arise over whose agenda shall become the basis of the home, it is often difficult to know when personal needs have become exploitative. But someplace between these poles of extreme suppression and extreme selfishness, monastic humility provides a basis for human community and a basis for union with God.

  To Benedict the process is clearly the work of a lifetime. He calls it “a ladder of humility” (RB 7:6), a climb with basic parts, a progression—not a leap—that involves the integration of both body and soul. “Our body and our soul are the two sides of this ladder” (RB 7:9), he teaches. No dualism here, just the simple, honest admission that each of us is grounded in something but reaching for God and that each of us is attempting to bring the demands of the body and the hope of the soul into parallel, into harmony, into center. Against gravity and despite all the imbalances of our lives. Pulling body and soul together is the problem. It is also the project of life.

  The tower and ladder symbols were favorites with the ancients, but it was left to Augustine to give us that marvelous line: “Do you seek God? Seek within yourself and ascend through yourself.” If we are really seeking God, we have to start in the very core of our own hearts and motives and expectations. We can’t blame the schedule or the finances or the work or the people in our lives for blocking our progress. We have to learn to seek from within ourselves. We have to stop waiting for the world around us to be perfect in order to be happy.