Wisdom Distilled from the Daily

by Joan Chittister

  The disassociation that comes from being only one small point on the assembly line of modern life has dulled our consciences and blinded our eyes to our own part in a world where death is our greatest export. The days are gone when the family that tilled the field also planted and harvested it together. Now owners own and planters plant and sprayers spray and pickers pick and sellers sell and none of them takes responsibility for the pesticides that reach our tables. Scientists calculate and designers design and welders weld and punchers punch and assemblers assemble and none of them takes responsibility for a nuclear world.

  The implications of a Benedictine spirituality of work in a world such as this are clear, it seems:

  Work is my gift to the world. It is my social fruitfulness. It ties me to my neighbor and binds me to the future. It lights up that spark in me that is most like the God of Genesis. I tidy the garden and plant the garden and distribute the goods of the garden and know that it is good.

  Work is the way I am saved from total self-centeredness. It gives me a reason to exist that is larger than myself. It makes me part of possibility. It gives me hope.

  Work gives me a place in salvation. It helps redeem the world from sin. It enables creation to go on creating. It brings us all one step closer to what the Kingdom is meant to be.

  Work, in the Benedictine vision, is meant to build community. When we work for others, we give ourselves, and we can give alms as well. We never work, in other words, for our own good alone.

  Work leads to self-fulfillment. It uses the gifts and talents we know we have and it calls on gifts in us of which we are unaware. It makes us open to new dimensions of our own personalities and talents as yet undiscovered.

  Work is its own asceticism. A Benedictine spirituality doesn’t set out to create hair shirts or debilitating fasts as a pledge of commitment or a badge of spiritual discipline. No, Benedictine spirituality simply faces the work at hand, with all its difficulties and all its rigors and all its repetition and all its irritations—and accepts it. What today’s work brings is what is really due from me to God.

  Work, finally, is the basic Benedictine way of living poverty and being in solidarity with the poor. The Benedictine doesn’t set out to live off of others. The Benedictine doesn’t sponge and doesn’t shirk and doesn’t cheat. Benedictine spirituality gives a day’s work for a day’s pay. Sloughing work off on those down the pecking order from us, assuming that personal days are automatically just additional vacation days, taking thirty-minute coffee breaks in the fifteen-minute schedule, doing one coat of paint where we promised to do two, is not a Benedictine way of looking at work in the Garden.

  Like the monastic who meets the beggar on the way to market, the purpose of work in Benedictine life is to carry others, to care for them, and to see them safely home. The old spinning wheel and typewriter and altar bread baker and shovel in our Heritage Room are clear proof of how well that has been done by those before us. The task of a corporate society whose guiding star is the bottom line and whose measure of value is money must somehow do the same.

  8

  Holy Leisure: The Key to a Good Life

  We believe that the times for both [prayerful reading and manual labor] may be arranged as follows: From Easter to the first of October, they will spend their mornings after Prime till about the fourth hour at whatever work needs to be done. From the fourth hour until the time of Sext, they will devote themselves to reading.

  Above all, one or two seniors must surely be deputed to make the rounds of the monastery while the members are reading. Their duty is to see that no one is so apathetic as to waste time or engage in idle talk to the neglect of the reading…. On Sunday all are to be engaged in reading except those who have been assigned various duties.

  RB 48:2-4; 17-18; 22

  Nothing in the monastery fascinates me as much as our use of candles and vigil lights. You would think that in a world of fluorescent lights and rheostats, gooseneck lamps and incandescent bulbs that candles and lamp stands and vigil lights would be long gone. But no, not here. Not in my monastery. We hang them burning in the monastery hail outside of chapel during Holy Week and we light a candle tor thirty days after the death of a sister and we give them as a sign of perpetual profession and we carry them when we renew our baptismal promises. Candles and vigil lights focus our minds on the light of Christ and remind us always of the ebb of our lives. They tell us that day is slipping by. They tell us that it is time to look into the dark spots of our souls and bring light there. They teach us not to burn the candle at both ends.

  And, as time goes by in the Benedictine life, if you contemplate a candle long enough, you come to understand the Rule and get the message. It has been part of this community forever, I think.

  Years ago, before the lakefront erosion washed it down the shale bluff on which it sat, a gazebo perched on the outer edge of the shoreline that fronts our monastery. Even on Ninth Street, the site of the original monastery in the center of town, a small cloister yard was set aside for walking. Now there are trails that go deep into our woods behind the monastery and a small sunset deck on every cabin on the property. Every night I watch the sisters leave the house to walk along the creek that winds its way through our property to the lake. In early autumn and spring the dining room patio and residence hall porches are full of quiet people. In the wintertime, a fire crackles downstairs nightly while the snow beats against three walls of windows. Everywhere we look, in other words, there is the call to come apart and rest awhile that has been part of the community soul for years. These are busy people, these sisters of mine. They work with the poor and console the dying and feed the hungry and witness to peace and care for the elderly and teach the underprivileged and study and serve and welcome and give warmth everywhere they are, day after day after day. But they are never too busy, it seems, to realize that life is not only lived in doing. They are not so involved in work that they forget that we have no light to give to others unless we first of all have it in ourselves.

  The most rigorous ascetics of ail, the early Desert Monastics, considered the problem as well, it seems. Was all of life to be a penance? Was all of life to be hard work? Was all of life designed to exhaust the body in order to save the soul? Was all of life meant to be spent pouring oneself out? In answer, they began to tell a story about Abba Anthony.

  One day a hunter in the desert saw Abba Anthony enjoying himself with the brethren and he was shocked. What kind of spiritual guide was this?

  But the old monk said to him, “Put an arrow in your bow and shoot it.” So the hunter did. Then the old man said, “Now shoot another.” And the hunter did. Then the elder said, “Shoot your bow again. Keep shooting; keep shooting; keep shooting.” And the hunter finally said, “But if I bend my bow so much I will break it.”

  Then Abba Anthony said to him, “It is just the same with the work of God. If we stretch ourselves beyond measure, we will break. Sometimes it is necessary to meet other needs.” When the hunter heard these words he was struck with remorse and, greatly edified by Anthony, he went away. As for the monastics there, they went home strengthened.

  Leisure, in other words, is an essential part of Benedictine spirituality. It is not laziness and it is not selfishness. It has something to do with the depth and breadth, length and quality of life.

  In an American culture, however, leisure may also be one of the most difficult spiritual elements to achieve. We are trained to be doers and makers, not dreamers and seers. Benedictine spirituality, on the other hand, sets out to develop people who reflect on what they are doing, people for whom the gospel is the filter through which they see their world.

  Work, it is clear from the Rule of Benedict, must not exist in a vacuum. Monastics do not exist to work. Work is to be integrated into monastic life without doing violence to either In the Benedictine vision of life, no one dimension of life is to be exclusive. Prayer, community, and personal development are all as essential to the good life as work. And that
takes a sense of holy leisure.

  Scholars of the Talmud say that the Sabbath is emphasized in Genesis not to show that God needed rest, because that would be heresy, but to show that God created rest and that God demanded rest. Rest, Sabbath, the rabbis insisted, were essential to creation for three reasons.

  First, they argued, the Sabbath equalized the rich and the poor. For one day a week, at least, everyone was the same. On the Sabbath, the rich could not oppress the poor or control the poor or consume the poor. On the Sabbath, rich and poor were equally free. Second, the rabbis taught, the purpose of the Sabbath was to give us time to evaluate our work as God had evaluated the work of creation to see if our work, too, was “good.” Finally, the rabbis declared, the purpose of the Sabbath was to give us time to contemplate the meaning of life.

  In fact, the rabbis pointed out, if one-seventh of every week is rest, then one-seventh of life is rest: 52 days a year, 3,640 days in seventy years—or ten years of sabbath, rest, and reflection in a lifetime, which are all designed to be used for reflection on meaning. Sabbath, in other words, is that period for holy leisure when I take time to look at life in fresh, new ways.

  In his plan of life, Benedict set aside four hours a day for prayer, six to nine hours a day for work, seven to nine hours for sleep, about three hours for eating and rest, and three hours a day for reading and reflection time. I remember the kind of surprise that came over me when, after years in the community, I suddenly realized one morning in chapel at the daily oral reading of the Rule that Benedict wasn’t saying that someone should be sent around the monastery to see if people were doing their work. He was saying that they should be sent around the monastery to see if the monastics were doing their reading and reflecting (RB 48). The community should be mindful, in other words, to see that people were taking time to live a thoughtful as well as a productive life.

  Benedict’s schedule, of course, is an agrarian and monastic one. ft does not work for families with small children. ft does not work for people who commute across large cities. It does not work for those whose workday runs from early office hours to evening appointments. But if Benedict’s hours don’t compute for us, his ideas are more important than ever. We may not be able to keep that particular schedule, you and I, but we must find a life rhythm that somehow satisfies each of those elements.

  The question for a time of rapid transit and conference calls and triple-shift work days is balance. And the answer is balance too.

  But what is balance in a society whose skewing of time has it totally off balance? What is balance in a culture that has destroyed the night with perpetual light and keeps equipment going twenty-four hours a day because it is more costly to turn machines on and off than it is to pay people to run them at strange and difficult hours? In the first place, balance for us is obviously not a mathematical division of the day. For most of us, our days simply do not divide that easily. In the second place, balance for us is clearly not equivalence. Because I have done forty hours of work this week does not mean that I will get forty hours of prayer and leisure. What it does mean, however, is that somehow I must make time for both. I must make time, or die inside.

  Leisure has two dimensions, play and rest. The Benedictine Rule does not talk about play because play was built right into sixth century life by the church calendar. One of the functions of holy days and festivals, most of which started in churches and religious communities, was to provide both the privileged and the peasants of the society with space and time for common enjoyment. On Church feasts commoners could not be required to work. Play was the Church’s gift to the working class in a day before labor unions and industrialization.

  Now, in this century, we even have to learn how to play. Indeed we have more opportunities for play than generations before us, but we have managed to make most of our play simply a special kind of work. We organize our ball teams into leagues and our running into races and our swimming into exercise programs and our tennis into tournaments. The movies are violent and the plays are expensive. It costs money to take children to the zoo to see animals that once could be seen in the backyard for nothing. Toys must be educational and of infinite variety. Play has become big business in the United States, and so most of America has taken to television watching instead to avoid their anxieties and their exhaustion, with the Fourth of July and the Memorial Day weekend the only recognized deviations from the anesthetizing social norm.

  The notion of celebrating life as communities and families together, the underlying value of the old church feasts, is long gone. The balance of family and social recreation is becoming harder and harder to come by. The balance of work and real play, activities done for no purpose at all except the release and recapture of energy, is becoming foreign. As a consequence our souls are drying up in work and our minds are being numbed by TV nothingness. We need to learn to play again if our spiritual lives are going to be healthy at all.

  But play is not the only indicator of non-work or personal growth, and it is not at all the dimension that Benedict treated. The leisure that Benedictine spirituality deals with is holy leisure, leisure that is for holy things, leisure that makes the human more human by engaging the heart and broadening the vision and deepening the insight and stretching the soul. Benedictine spirituality is more intent on developing thinking people than it is on developing pious people. It is one thing to pray prayers; it is another thing to be prayerful.

  To understand leisure is to avoid being one of the lemmings of life who follow the crowd and follow the boss and follow the party line. Holy leisure asks, What is it to follow the gospel in this situation, now, here? Holy leisure means I take time to step back and ask what’s going on in this, in them, in me. I take time to try to understand what the Jesus-life demands in this situation.

  Our scholastic director told us repeatedly, “No matter how valuable your work, remember that the empty vessel must be filled.” The message was clear. You can’t give anybody anything unless you have something inside you to give. Machines can do the computation and animals can do the heavy work. Only you can bring spiritual quality to wherever you are, but first you must have it yourself. And it must be nourished, regularly.

  Holy leisure, in other words, is the foundation of contemplation. There is an idea abroad in the land that contemplation is the province of those who live in cloistered communities and that it is out of reach to the rest of us who bear the noonday heat in the midst of the maddening crowd. But if that’s the case, then Jesus who was followed by people and surrounded by people and immersed in people was not a contemplative. And Francis of Assisi was not a contemplative. And Teresa of Avila was not a contemplative. And Catherine of Siena was not a contemplative. And Thomas Merton was not a contemplative. And Mahatma Gandhi was not a contemplative. Obviously, some of our greatest contemplatives have been our most active and most effective people. No, contemplation is not withdrawal from the human race.

  The problem is that we must learn to distinguish between purpose and meaning in life. Purpose is part of what it means to be white, Western, American. Purpose has something to do with being productive and setting goals and knowing what needs to be done and doing it. It is easy to have purpose. To write seven letters today, to wax that floor, to finish this legal brief, to make out those reports, to complete this degree, that’s purpose. Meaning, on the other hand, depends on my asking myself who will care and who will profit and who will be touched and who will be forgotten or hurt or affected by my doing those things. Purpose determines what I will do with this part of my life. Meaning demands to know why I’m doing it and with what global results.

  Contemplation, therefore, is not a vacation from life. Contemplation is the pursuit of meaning. The contemplative is intent on determining the relative value of things in life. The contemplative believes that everything we do either advances or obstructs our search for meaning in life. Those who find the will of God everywhere and feel the presence of God anywhere are the real contemplatives.


  Real contemplatives don’t separate political morality and private morality. They know that all of life is one. Real contemplatives don’t think in terms of this world and the next. They know that life is simply an ongoing process, only part of which is clear to us at any one time. Real contemplatives don’t substitute daydreaming for doing the will of God. In the midst of the greatest spiritual moments in the record of humankind, Moses was sent away from the burning bush, Joseph was sent to take care of Mary, Mary Magdalene was sent to tell the apostles of the resurrection. The moment of enlightenment, it seems, comes not for itself but for the sake of the mission. Immersion in the God-life demands a response, not a rest. Real contemplatives don’t spend life staring into space. That kind of contemplation can simply become a disguise for pure escape, or worse, for selfishness. Idleness is not a synonym for contemplation.

  Real contemplation, in other words, is not for its own sake. It doesn’t take us out of reality. On the contrary, it puts us in touch with the world around us by giving us the distance we need to see where we are more clearly. To contemplate the gospel and not respond to the wounded in our own world cannot be contemplation at all. That is prayer used as an excuse for not being Christian. That is spiritual dissipation.

  Contemplation is the ability to see the world around us as God sees it. Contemplation is a sacred mindfulness of my holy obligation to care for the world I live in. Contemplation is awareness of God within me and in the people around me. Contemplation is consciousness of the real fullness of life. Contemplatives don’t let one issue in life consume all their nervous energy or their hope. God is bigger than this problem at work or this irritating neighbor at home or this dependent relative in the family. God is calling me on and on and on, beyond all these partial things, to the goodness of the whole of life and my responsibility to it.