Wisdom Distilled from the Daily

by Joan Chittister

  We’re a people who lack awareness. We’re a world that has lost a sense of balance. We’re a people for whom wholeness is a frayed and sorry notion. The assembly-line culture has atomized our production process and our way of thinking as well. No one sees the consequences of their actions come together anymore as carpenters and builders did in the periods of history before us. It takes a real leap of insight now to go from the moral implications of welding missile canisters to the ethical possibility that we are colluding in the planned destruction of the globe. It’s so hard to think that the herbicides I use in my garden contribute to the poisoning of the planet. Or that the emission from our third car is one emission too many for the neighborhood. Or that things, things, things are crowding out our senses and our souls. Or that time has gone crazily askew.

  In the face of all of that, Benedictine spirituality does not ask the monastic to be a pauper or a stranger in the land. Monastics, the Rule declares, are to be given “the proper amount of food” (RB 39), “the proper amount of drink” (RB 40), “the clothing of the region, whatever they need” (RB 55:1-2). No, destitution is not of the essence of Benedictine spirituality Benedictine spirituality asks simply for harmony, awareness, and balance. Benedictine spirituality asks us to spend our time well and to be careful that our wants are not confused with our needs and to treat the world and everything in it as sacred. Benedictine spirituality asks us to recognize our connectedness. Benedictine spirituality calls us to be mindful.

  Benedictine spirituality asks us to be mindful about things. Monastics must learn to use what they are and what they have for the good of the human race. We have to learn to be mindful that creation belongs to God and we have only been put here as its keepers. Each of us has been given something to keep well: a small garden, a tiny room, a simple apartment, our bodies. That much, surely, we could take care of mindfully.

  Two ideas militate against our consciously contributing to a better world. The idea that we can do everything or the conclusion that we can do nothing to make this globe a better place to live are both temptations of the most insidious form. One leads to arrogance; the other to despair. The fact is that we can, however, be mindful of our own worlds and so, perhaps, make others more mindful of theirs.

  Somehow, monastic mindfulness recognizes that small actions are global in their scope and meaning. People who would not litter in a church will litter on the highway because they see no connection between the two. A monastic mentality, on the other hand, considers the two actions the same.

  The monastic knows the world has become an interlocking village—big, bureaucratic, impersonal, remote. Decisions made in one part of the world have long-range consequences for the rest of it. Pollution of the Great Lakes eventually affects the water systems of the whole earth. Destruction of the South American forest lands reduces the air quality of the entire hemisphere. Concentration of mineral resources in the hands of a few retards the development of half the families of the world. The control and consumption of energy sources by some make technology unavailable to most. The weak are ignored. Women are excluded. The powerful are enslaved by their own devotion to profit rather than quality.

  In the middle of all of this, though, the monastic lives in one monastery in one small place with a one-eyed, single-minded mindfulness of that piece of the Garden. In the midst of all this, Benedictine spirituality requires all of us to go through life taking back one inch of the planet at a time until the Garden of Eden grows green again. The fact is that where those who follow the Rule of Benedict live, the world will become an ordered, cared-for place. Resources, people, products, and time become precious.

  Monastic mindfulness sees everything as one: the people of the earth, the resources of the earth, the products of the earth. Each of them is to be used in ways that do not injure any of the others. Each of them is to be cared for well. In a culture that depends on planned obsolescence, that builds things in ways that assure their breakdown, monastic mindfulness comes to recall that one more desk discarded before its time is one more tree lost to the globe. The question is not, “Is another desk available in our time?” The question is, is another desk necessary in our time? If not, what will replacing it mean for the populations of the future? Plastics and their pollutions? Plywood and its lack of beauty? Formica and the loss of the natural anywhere in life?

  Benedictine spirituality is a spirituality of transformation. The land is to be transformed from the barren to the bountiful; life is to be transformed from the chaotic to the ordered; thinking is to be transformed from the scattered to the centered; relationships are to be transformed from the exploitative to the ennobling. Everything necessary is to be provided, yes, but the Rule says clearly: “the vice of private ownership” is to be “completely uprooted” (RB 33:1).

  To do that, a lot of things have to change. We have to quit listening to the ads that are designed to seduce us. We have to pare life down to its simplest base. We have to come to understand that we have been allotted our portion of the goods of the earth; we have not been given the goods of the universe for our own personal consumption. We own this earth in common with the poor. We have to learn the difference between needs and wants so that the needs of all can be supplied, which doesn’t mean that my own life must be narrow or restricted. It simply means that I must come to understand the difference between having it all and having everything.

  I may need to get out on the lake at sunset to cleanse my soul and drain off the tensions of the day. But I do not need to go into debt to do it. A small boat will do, not the newest, not the best, not the largest motor. If it’s the experience I want and not the exhilaration that comes from the envy of others, then a nice, safe, seaworthy little craft will provide me the spiritual experience of solitude and quiet and immediate contact with the God of nature without having to compete with the U.S. Navy in the process.

  I may need to dress well for work and professional gatherings. But weekly shopping sprees and closets full of slightly worn silks are hardly necessary. A basic wardrobe and a few nice party things are surely enough in a world where the poor have nothing and the rich don’t even remember what they do own.

  I may need a car to get to work on time, but does it need to include every gadget known to modern marketing: four stereo speakers, two sheepskin seat covers, the brass-topped gearshift?

  And most of all, do I have to have the top of the line in everything? Isn’t it one thing to indulge myself in one aspect of life—my clothes, or my furniture, or my toys— and entirely another to do it in everything? The point is that once I begin to clutter my house with things that separate me from life, I have become unfree, a prisoner of consumption, a hoarder of artifacts. Then it’s not exciting enough to just sit and look anymore, or walk and see anymore, or listen and respond anymore. I have to surround myself with things that are not real and do not fill the inside of me or of anyone else. They own me now; I don’t own them.

  Even when, years ago, the practice was for nuns to wear medieval garb, it was a Lenten practice in our community to do an annual inventory of goods and clothing. We wrote down “five coifs, three scapulars, three habits, seven books, one book bag” to determine where we were slipping over into accumulation. It was a chastening exercise that I have learned to miss. The question is, What would our lives look like on paper today? Simple and harmonious and whole, or silly and trivial and fiercely independent and depressingly insecure? The early monastics told of Abba Agathon, the desert master, who often went away to new places taking nothing with him but his knife for making the wicker baskets that were his living. But you and me? We accumulate all our lives and carry the things around with us until we have spent more time and money on things than we have on living.

  Benedictine harmony and Benedictine balance demand a simpler approach to life, not for the sake of false asceticism but for the sake of human freedom. The gods we have made for ourselves take so much more adoration time than any human being has to give.

  Benedic
tine harmony and balance require, too, a respect for time as well as for personal goods and planetary stewardship. The way we spend our time may well be our greatest resource and it will certainly influence what we do with the way we treat the earth we live on and the things we own.

  Benedict was quite precise about it all. Time was to be spent in prayer, in sacred reading, in work, and in community participation. In other words, it was to be spent on listening to the Word, on study, on making life better for others, and on community building. It was public as well as private; it was private as well as public. It was balanced. No one thing consumed the monastic’s life. No one thing got exaggerated out of all proportion to the other dimensions of life. No one thing absorbed the human spirit to the exclusion of every other. Life was made up of many facets and only together did they form a whole. Physical labor and mental prayer and social life and study and community concerns were all pieces of the puzzle of life. Life flowed through time, with time as its guardian. Not now.

  With the invention of the light bulb, balance became a myth. Now human beings could extend the day and deny the night. Now human beings could break the natural rhythm of work and rest and sleep. Now human beings could begin to destroy the framework of life and turn it into one eternal day, with, ironically, no time for family, no time for reading, no time for prayer, no time for privacy, no time for silence, no time for time. Suddenly, we needed the wisdom of the Rule more than ever.

  Somewhere in my formative years, I made the mistake of telling the prioress that the reason I wanted to be excused from Matins and the evening curfew was because I had a term paper to write for a college class which I had had no time to complete before that. She let her body sink back into her high-backed wooden chair from which point she could see me more piercingly, tapped her finger over her lips, and looked d o w n at me over her glasses. “My dear child,” she said slowly to make sure I didn’t miss the import of the message, “we have all the time there is.” The lesson got more meaningful as time went on. The fact is not that we don’t have time for important things in life. The fact is that we don’t take time for the important things in life. We don’t take the prayer time. We don’t take the reading and reflection time with Scripture. We don’t take the time we need to make the family, family.

  Our time gets totally out of balance. We spend it all on friends, or we spend none of it there. We spend it all on work, or we spend it all on our compulsions. We spend it all on the body, or we spend none of it on the body. We spend it all talking, or we spend none of it talking. We go from one personal prison to the next. And, eventually, there’s no sense of monastic order—pray, read, work, serve, share, rest—at all. We wake up some day and realize we haven’t heard from old friends for years; we haven’t been to see our aging relatives in the local nursing homes for months; we don’t know the names of our cousin’s children anymore; we haven’t fixed the family graves since the funerals; we haven’t written a personal letter for years; we haven’t sat in a large easy chair and read a good novel for ages; we haven’t read a profound book since we got out of school. And life is flying by. All skewed.

  Then, little by little, things in us go dry before we know they’re gone. Church has become a mechanical function. Social life has become strained. A sense of achievement is gone. No one in the neighborhood knows who we are. Family life is dull. Our spiritual life has gone to straw. Living has become a numbing rather than an enlivening thing.

  Balance, the Rule says. Balance. And harmony. And awareness. What I do not bring to life, life cannot possibly give me. Benedict says that we must bring a sense of order and awe and proportion and perspective. When the casinos stay open twenty-four hours a day and the TV movies show all night and noise seeps into every nook and cranny of life, it takes a special love of life to control it before it sweeps us away in a torrent of activities that clutter rather than cleanse us.

  What are the signs of harmony and balance and awareness in our lives? People with a sense of Benedictine balance see that life is a medley of multiple dimensions, each of which must be developed. They have become more than either their work or their play. Nothing consumes them and everything taps something new in them. They walk through life smelling the flowers. They need enough money, some play, good work, steady friends, spiritual growth, intellectual stimulation, and harmony with nature. They do not set out to get all the money they can, to be invited to every party in town, to collect a prestigious circle of well-connected acquaintances, to make religion magic, or to become a body-building fanatic.

  They make time for every facet of life. They live a rhythm of life that includes the natural, the spiritual, the social, the productive, the physical, and the personal. They can tell you each week what they have done in each area. They live life well. They are, in fact, fully alive.

  To live a life of Benedictine harmony means we have to become caretakers of our world, not its enemies. We have to learn to love the natural again: natural grass and natural vegetables and natural air. We have to learn to care for what we have rather than casually destroy and unthinkingly replace things simply because they bore us. We have to learn to walk through life on tiptoe, not destroying, not trampling, not neglecting what has as much right to be here as we.

  To live a life of Benedictine awareness means we must come to see what we cannot. To the monastic mind, everything speaks of God. What I have and what I do not have. What I want and what I do not want. What I care for and what I do not care for. But the message is not easily extracted. It takes reflection and prayer and the wisdom of others. Life takes working through. Life takes perspective. Life takes a sense of significance and a happy admission of insignificance. Life takes a willingness to deal with what we are and where we are and why. But I can’t be rushing from meeting to meeting and paycheck to paycheck and party to party and store to store at breakneck speed and expect to be able to do all of that. No, somehow or other, I have to begin to do it all consciously. With more than now in mind, on the one hand, and with only now in mind on the other.

  Benedictine harmony and balance and awareness call us all to life drunk deeply. And, interestingly enough, there has probably never been a better moment in history’ to do that. We have information that has never been known before. We have a vision of the world and all of its people and all of their needs that has never been known to humankind before this time. We have scientific insights that are far beyond the understandings of our ancestors. We have a level of technology that frees us to be humans, not beasts of burden, that frees us to be thinkers on the planet rather than mere survivors of its rigors. We have a mechanized life, a computerized life, and a connected life that frees us and bonds us as at no other time in human history.

  All we lack, now that life has become so speeded up, is the will to slow it down so that we can live a little while life goes by. We need to want to be human as well as efficient; to be loving as well as informed; to be caring as well as knowledgeable; to be happy as well as respected.

  It’s not easy. But the Rule of Benedict says, “Take care of everything, revere one another, eat and drink moderately, pray where you work, think deeply about life every day, read, sleep well, don’t demand the best of everything, pray daily, live as community” (RB 4). Be sure that one part of your life is not warring against the other.

  The light that penetrates all the separate windows in the monastery chapel is what gives them balance and harmony. By themselves they are discordant and fragmented and competitive in their clamor for attention. My life is like that. All of its separate segments cry for my total attention. It is only the continued awareness that comes from the development of a perspective on life that is broader and deeper than any of them that convinces me that no one of them alone is worth it. Work can seduce us with our own godship. Too much play can make us shallow. People can become our chains. Even prayer can shrink our souls if prayer becomes an end unto itself, a chloroform rather than a consciousness.

  Benedictine spirituality asks for
so much more than that. Benedictine spirituality requires balance and harmony and awareness. Benedictine spirituality requires that we live life to the full.

  7

  Work: Participation in Creation

  They [monastics] must not become distressed if local conditions or their poverty should force them to do the harvesting themselves. When they live by the labor of their hands, as our ancestors and the apostles did, then they are really monastics.

  Those who are sick or weak should be given a type of work or craft that will keep them busy without overwhelming them or driving them away. The abbot must take their infirmities into account.

  RB 48:7-8; 24-25

  We keep four things in our monastery that I’m sure anyone else with a good sense for order and efficiency would have thrown away long years ago: an old spinning wheel, a vintage 1920 typewriter, an unused altar bread baker, and a shiny new shovel with a bow around it. They sit out in plain view for all the world to see in what we call “The Heritage Room.” There are no signs on them. No dates. No explanations. They just sit there, reminding us, agitating us, calling us.

  The spinning wheel comes from the 1800s when the nuns apparently made their own thread and cloth. I’ve never seen it used, nor do I know anyone who has. The typewriter belonged to Mother Rose. She was one of the early intellectuals in the community and typewritten papers and community memos were her stock-in-trade.