Wisdom Distilled from the Daily

by Joan Chittister

  Then, however, Benedict does a totally countercultural thing with his ladder image. He turns it upside down: “We descend by exaltation,” he says, and “we ascend by humility” (RB 7:7). The monastic life, it seems, has different values from the values of life around it. To set out on the path of Benedictine spirituality is to see the world differently from the way it is seen by those around us. What they call up, we may well call down. What they call success we may well call failure. What they call achievement we may well call entrapment. We aren’t in this thing for ourselves only. We’re going to God by pouring ourselves out in a culture that hoards money and titles and invitations and power like gold.

  For here in the presentation of humility, life is put before us raw. Here life is simply life. Here life by current standards is totally reversed: up is indeed down; humility is exaltation. Life is not about “me.” Life is about God. What the psychiatrists have begun to hint at, Benedict already knew. Self-preference, self-will, self-love, and radical egotism are attempts to make ourselves our God. I become the ultimate arbiter of good and evil in my life. Growth becomes impossible.

  Benedict’s process for achieving humility and conversion in life is outlined in twelve progressive degrees, each one essential to the achievement of the next and each one a simple excursion into accepting life in the here and now as the refiner’s fire of my present and the raw material of my future. It is a very simple approach to what we insist on making complex.

  “The first degree of humility,” the Rule reads, “is that we always have the fear of God before our eyes, shunning all forgetfulness and that we be ever mindful of all that God has commanded” (RB 7:10–11). The first rung of the ladder to union with God and harmony in life is to let God be God. We make so many things in life god—this job, that person, this thing, that title—that eventually we forget who God really is. We forget what really lasts in life. We forget that there are responsibilities that come with creaturehood: to tend the garden and to care for it, to take care of the creatures and to be helpmates to one another. We forget the presence of God and so we act as if God were not present. We belittle one another and make fun of the poor and reject the alien. We make ourselves god and forget the will of God in others for us.

  The second degree of humility follows easily. If God is present in life then I must accept the will of God for me. When circumstances persist even though I bend every effort to eliminate them, then clearly those are the will of God for me. There is something in them that I must learn to deal with. There is something about them that is essential to my growth. There are, at least, other ways and other answers and other plans than mine that obviously bear recognition if I am to grow beyond myself and come to appreciate the beauty in others.

  The third degree of humility requires that we be willing to subject ourselves to the direction of others. Here we touch the human being’s unlimited will to power. Here we’re brought to learn that there are events and people outside my life who, like it or not, do have power over me. Here I am asked to acknowledge my mortality. Life is not in my hands. I am not in control of every aspect of it and it is only when I fool myself into thinking that I am that the frustration sets in.

  The recognition of any authority outside myself leashes the insatiable thirst for power within me. Humility means I might be able to listen to the manager at work. It means I might be able to take directions from a friend. It means I might not have to control my home and my schedule and my territory It means I might be free to give up arrogance and foreswear omnipotence. It means I admit I need conversion and then open myself to seeking and accepting the will of God through others. The fact is that I do not have unlimited freedom. Obedience to God’s will sets limits.

  The fourth degree of humility brings us to accept the difficulties imposed on us by others in life “with patience and even temper and not grow weary or give up” (RB 7:35–36). This degree of humility asks for emotional maturity. Life is full of hard things, most of which are not impossible and not immoral, simply difficult. Sometime in the spiritual life we have to stop running away from the things that aggravate us so we can see what it is that is being demanded of us that we are refusing to give.

  Most of all, the fourth degree of humility requires that we give everybody else’s ideas a chance. When we accept people in positions above us, we can’t second-guess everything they do or want instant effects. Sometimes we will just have to wait. Sometimes we will just have to keep trying to make the thing work their way. Sometimes we will just have to let the others figure out the weaknesses of a thing in their own way, in their own good time. What good will pushing really do? And what is the good of a better idea about meaningless things if we lose our life relationships in the process of proving ourselves to be right?

  “The fifth degree of humility is when one hides from the Abbot none of the evil thoughts that rise in one’s heart or the evils committed in secret but humbly confesses them” (RB 7:44). The monastic heart is asked to put down hypocrisy, is asked to quit pretending to be something it is not, is asked to open itself to the cure of souls. What this degree of humility implies an entire profession has arisen to affirm. The psychologist knows that when we throw light into the caves of our hearts we discover without question that the dragon that lives there is not nearly as big as we thought.

  This degree says if we want to grow, self-disclosure and interaction with others are imperative. We admit our weaknesses and limitations and someone else—a friend, wife, husband, parent, someone close enough to care about how we develop—guides us through the morass of uncertainties and struggles that our lives have somehow, silently and insidiously, become. Someone holds us up while we go on. We put down all our false images and we become who we are with someone who cares. We recognize someone else’s strengths so that they can call us from our weakness.

  At the next level of development, the sixth, the monastic is asked to “be content with the meanest and worst of everything” (RB 7:49). Grasping for the fineries of life has become an American obsession. Small children have learned to want the best of the world’s racing bikes, not just a bike. Adults have learned that their backyards are incomplete, no matter how beautiful, without a swimming pool of their own. Young college graduates have been conditioned to expect top pay and good restaurants and big cars to come automatically with the diploma. To be seen on a three-speed bike or to swim in the park or to work for a small company where the pay is modest and the office appointments are functional rather than elegant is somehow to have failed. How can it possibly be explained to the neighbors?

  In Benedictine spirituality, the explanation is simple: what I need to make me happy in this life is not of this world. I was not put here to have the best of life’s goods; I was put here to have what I need for my body so my soul can thrive. I was put here to appreciate what is.

  Of all the degrees of humility, the fifth degree of self-disclosure may be the most American and the sixth degree of self-denial the most un-American. Why not have all the things I can have? Because I don’t need them, and they clutter the soul and tie me down to the lesser things in life. No time for sacred reading while I clean the pool; no time for the family while I’m climbing the corporate ladder instead of the ladder of humility. No time to discover the basic joys of life when I’m allowed to learn young the need to outstrip the neighborhood in things. No time even to learn the value of money when what I use it for isn’t needed at all. But this degree of humility that calls us to be content with less frees us from the cloying burden of the unnecessary in life.

  The sixth degree of humility touches to the quick. Is it wrong to buy the larger car? Is it un-Christian to own the beach house? Is it unholy to build well, and buy well, and invest well? And if so, what about the huge monasteries and big churches and great art pieces that are so common a part of Benedictine monasteries themselves? The situation is a delicate one and not to be rationalized. Amassing, hoarding, overbuilding, and overbuying are inimical to Benedictine spirituality.
Beauty, simplicity, need, sufficiency, and the just distribution of goods are essential to it. Benedictine spirituality does not call for poverty. Benedictine spirituality calls for right use and generous care and the open hand. There is a thin line between the two, granted, but the line is worth walking and the discomfort is worth bearing if it becomes the criteria we use to measure our own complicity in a society that is never content with the worst of anything, that has to be number one in everything.

  The challenge of the sixth degree of humility is to live prophetically in a world that thinks only in terms of getting more rather than of having enough. Benedictine spirituality, real humility, demands that we hold only to give and that we gather only to share.

  The seventh degree of humility, presented in the language of the sixth century, is hard to accept on first blush. It reads: “The seventh degree of humility is when the monastic believes that he or she is the lowest and vilest of all” (RB 7:51). But it’s equally hard to take when it’s reversed: “The seventh degree of humility is when we believe that we are the highest and best of all.” And that’s the clue to understanding it, I believe. Unless we see ourselves as potentially weaker, potentially more sinful, potentially more confused than anyone around us, how can we possibly understand and accept them? If we make ourselves the norm of society, who else can ever meet our standards? If we see ourselves as Mary of Nazareth instead of Mary Magdalene, more like John than like Judas, then where is the room for conversion in our own lives; where is the room for compassion for others?

  It’s the seventh degree of humility that requires us to learn to take criticism. It asks us to accept the fact that there is plenty of room for growth in us. Thanks to the seventh degree of humility we can open ourselves to new possibilities within ourselves. Here we stop saying, “Well, that’s just the way I am,” and begin to say, “There is more that I can be.” This seventh degree of humility, then, is the degree of humility that deals with a new perspective on life.

  The eighth degree of humility reminds us of our place in the human race. At the eighth degree, the monastic “does nothing but what is sanctioned by the Rule and the example of the elders” (RB 7:55). Benedictine spirituality depends on our being willing to listen and to learn from what perennially has been found to be true. We learn that community itself is a source of wisdom for us, that the major relationships of our lives have not been given to us to be exploited by us; they have been given to us to teach us. We learn we must learn at every stage of life from those who have gone before us. We learn to learn from what has been found trustworthy by others instead of insisting on reinventing every wheel. We learn we are not the center of the universe but there is plenty that we can gain from others at every age. We learn we will never arrive and that is all right.

  And, finally, like the psychologists of our own day, Benedict deals with speech. In the ninth, tenth and eleventh degrees of humility, Benedict counsels the disciple to “withhold the tongue from speaking” (RB 7:56), “to be not easily moved and quick for laughter” (RB 7:59), and “to speak gently, humbly, with gravity and with few and sensible words” (RB 7:60).

  The focus of the three is apparent: we shouldn’t spend our lives telling other people how to run theirs. We should be soft in our speech, not harsh, not hard, not raucous, not rude, not rough. We should not be making light of serious things. We should not be making fun of other people. Life is serious business; acting the buffoon, being superficial about it, eating up our time with things that have no meaning for eternity, going through life under water does not make for the well-lived life.

  We should care about important things. We should be attending to things of substance. We should be kind to people. We should be listeners. These three degrees are clearly the way the humble person responds to others: not arrogantly, but reverently. These three degrees are humility’s response to others. When we have learned who we are, we can begin to treat others better. For the first time, perhaps, we can see who the others in our lives really are with all their wisdom and all their beauty and all their gifts and all their faces of Christ.

  Finally, the Rule teaches us, the twelfth degree of humility is that we are not only humble of heart but always let it appear also in our whole exterior to everyone who sees us.

  People who are really humble, who know themselves to be earth or humus—the root from which our word “humble” comes—have about themselves, an air of self-containment and self-control. There’s no haughtiness, no distance, no sarcasm, no put downs, no airs of importance or disdain. The ability to deal with both their own limitations and the limitations of others, the recognition that God is in life and that they are not in charge of the universe brings serenity and hope, inner peace and real energy Humble people walk comfortably in every group. No one is either too beneath them or too above them for their own sense of well-being. They are who they are, people with as much to give as to get, and they know it. And because they’re at ease with themselves, they can afford to be open with others. The promise is “having ascended all these degrees of humility we will arrive at that love of God, which being perfect, casts out fear” (RB 7:67). Having discovered who we are and having opened ourselves to life and having learned to be comfortable with it, we know that God is working in us. We know, most of all, that whatever happens we have nothing to fear. Life may be unclear, life may be difficult, but we are free of the false hopes and false faces and false needs that once held us down. We can fly now. Let all the others scratch and grapple for the plastic copy of life. We have found the real thing.

  Humility is simply a basic awareness of my relationship to the world and my connectedness to all its circumstances. It is the acceptance of relationships with others, not only for who they are but also for who I am. I do not interact with others to get something out of it; I make my way with all the others in my life because each of them has something important to call out of me, to support in me, to bring to fruit a vision of God in my life.

  Humility is not a false rejection of God’s gifts. To exaggerate the gifts we have by denying them may be as close to narcissism as we can get in life. No, humility is the admission of God’s gifts to me and the acknowledgment that I have been given them for others. Humility is the total continuing surrender to God’s power in my life and in the lives of those around me.

  The inner courtyard of our monastic community is seen by few but depended on by many for that glimpse of beauty we need in life to always see it anew. It seeps into our bones and our subconscious like the fine art of humility. It is there nourishing us quietly and calling us to something more worthy than the distractions of the day. It calls us to reality.

  6

  Monastic Mindfulness: A Blend of Harmony, Wholeness, Balance

  They will regard all uteasils and goods of the monastery as sacred vessels of the altar, aware that nothing is to be neglected. They should not be prone to greed, nor be wasteful and extravagant with the goods of the monastery, but should do everything with moderation and according to the abbot’s orders.

  RH 31:10-12

  The stained-glass windows of our chapel are a riot of color. Because the chapel has an east-west orientation, we are flooded with gold light from the left side of the altar during morning praise and bathed in blue light during vespers in the early evening. Every window carries a different concept and a different design. Every window has its own meaning. And yet they come together somehow in my mind and soul. I do not easily remember them only one at a time. I think of the windows all at once, and all at once they tear at my soul and work on my unconscious and stretch all the senses in me as we sing, “Now that the daylight fills the sky, we lift our hearts to God on high.” I never fail to be amazed at how all those colors and all those tiny pieces of glass and all those forms and figures go together without conflict. Then one day I realized that it was the light itself that gave all those different things integrity. It was simply light that blended them together and made them one for me.

  I began to wonder
what it was that gave all the other differences of life unity and integrity. What is it that makes for unity among the many opposing energies we meet in life that could instead become just so many instances of noisy clash and conflict? What is it that brings life together and people together and the world together and nature together? What is it, not in them, but in me that connects us all and makes harmony and wholeness possible in a fragmented life?

  Then I remembered the line in the Rule: “Treat the tools of the monastery as if they were the vessels of the altar” (RB 31:10). Clearly, in Benedictine spirituality, everything is sacred and everything is one. The awls, the rakes, the trough, and the chalice. All treated in the same breath. The ancients understood the notion well.

  One day a traveler begged the Teacher for a word of wisdom that would guide the rest of the journey.

  The Teacher nodded affably and though it was the day of silence took a sheet of paper and wrote on it a single word, “Awareness.”

  “Awareness?” the traveler said, perplexed. “That’s far too brief Couldn’t you expand on that a bit?”

  So the Teacher took the paper back and wrote: “Awareness, awareness, awareness.”

  “But what do these words mean?” the traveler insisted.

  Finally the Teacher reached for the paper and wrote, clearly and firmly, “Awareness, awareness, awareness means… Awareness!”

  Awareness of the sacred in life is what holds our world together and the lack of awareness and sacred care is what is tearing it apart. We have covered the earth with concrete and wonder why children have little respect for the land. We spill refuse into our rivers and wonder why boaters drop their paper plates and plastic bags and old rubber shoes overboard. We pump pollution into our skies and question the rising incidence of lung cancer. We produce items that do not decay and package things in containers that cannot be recycled. We fill our foods with preservatives that poison the human body and wonder why we’re not as well as we used to be. We make earth and heaven one large refuse dump and wonder why whole species of animals are becoming extinct and forests have disappeared and the ozone shield is shriveling.