We have learned a great deal about the “Self’ since Freud, but we may not have learned nearly so much about the “We.” Instead, parents are blamed for the problems of adult children. Teachers are blamed for the drift away from universal literacy in this country Police departments are blamed for the rising incidence of crime. Poverty is blamed for personal decadence. The concept of sin has given way to the notion of development. It’s surely time to ask when and where individual responsibility for the common good will again begin to play a part in personal life.
There is no doubt that this generation comes from a period that had managed to confuse the moral, the immoral, and the amoral beyond much recognition of any of them. Murder, missing church, and swearing, all occupied the same moral category. Puritanism and Jansenism, historic theories of the basic and essential evil of human nature, had done their work so well that when studies in personal development began to emerge in the 1950s, they found an audience eager to have their wrongdoings absolved and bent on proving that their present problems were a result of past circumstances, not accountable to them. People from alcoholic families blamed their homes for their present sense of rootlessness. People from broken homes blamed their parents’ problems for their own feelings of alienation from others. Children from poor homes blamed their poverty for their lack of discipline.
Benedictine spirituality offers a different model, harsh sounding in this day perhaps, but nevertheless more dignified in its assessment of the person than many more modern ideas. Benedict calls for correction, and even for punishment, if “having been told, the monastic does not amend” (RB 28:1). The point is we are, most of us, capable of change. We are not puppets at the end of a sociological string. Booker T. Washington emerged from the peanut fields of the country Caesar Chavez came out of the barrio. Jesse Jackson was an illegitimate child. Most of us have had something to overcome—alcoholism in the family, major illnesses, financial need. The Rule of Benedict simply assumes that good will is enough to make the difference. The Rule of Benedict does not assume that everyone can do the same things equally well—“Let only those read who can edify” (RB 38:12), the Rule directs— but he does assume that everyone can and must do something for the rest of the community. Everyone can and must help to carry everyone else. That’s what community, that’s what family is all about. Alone we may be little but together we can be something.
So the Rule of Benedict calls everyone to work at something the community needs and calls everyone to work for holiness and calls everyone to serve and calls everyone to help make community decisions. There is no room here, in other words, for family members who expect to be picked up after simply because they earn a salary. There is no room here for the frail to shift all the dishes onto others simply because they are subject to chronic headaches. There is no room here for forgiveness from life. There is no room here for me to absent myself from responsibility for the human race.
That, I believe, is the purpose of the Benedictine vow of stability. The vow of stability is not intended to attach a person to a place. Stability is intended to attach a person to a group, as family does, as nation does, as ethnicity does. The vow of stability says life is an enterprise to be undertaken together, not an entertainment to be indulged in alone. I’m not responsible for someone else only when I feel like it or when it’s not too much trouble. I’m responsible always, everyday, for all these people to whom I am continually related until one by one we have helped one another all the way through life.
In a culture where the family meal is a practice almost extinct, where family chores are done for money, where every member of the family has a schedule independent of all the others, where the elderly either live alone or in nursing homes, responsibility to the family as a whole is a value to be sought after and a prize to be achieved. But, without it—as Benedict implies in his choice of the community model over the eremitical tradition—each of us will simply be another rolling stone. We’ll touch group after group in life, perhaps, but the question, is will they ever touch us? Who will ever know us well enough to dare to confront our idiosyncracies? Whom will we ever know well enough to have our need for control and our gift of compassion tested and tried? In what way will we make the contribution to life that every person is born to make?
Responsibility is as much a part of personhood, in other words, as uniqueness. The same Rule that made provision for what everybody else of that period said a monastic didn’t need or shouldn’t have—good food, adequate drink, decent clothes, weakness and mercy and help—is also the spiritual document that told the buyer of the monastery to be patient with people and the community not to ask for things “out of time” (RB 31). Benedict wanted the servers to eat before the community meals so they wouldn’t find the task too much for them but exacted, too, that all the monastics would serve one another (RB 35). He allowed the artists and craftspeople in the monastery to practice their special gifts but warned them never to overcharge the buyers (RB 57). He wanted the abbot to have a prior with whom to share the burdens of administration but told the prior quite clearly that his role was to follow the abbot’s goals, not to devise a separate set that would confuse or divide the community (RB 65). He said that the sick were to be cared for, but he also wrote a chapter of the Rule to the sick themselves, telling them not to be demanding (RB 36). Uniqueness and independence are clearly not synonyms in the mind of Benedict of Nursia. Uniqueness and responsibility go hand in hand in Benedictine spirituality. By all means I should be who I am and have what I need, but you have a claim on those gifts. Those gifts were given to me as much for your sake as for my own. The community does not exist to make me possible. Together we exist to make the gospel possible.
We’re in a period in society today when people work together for years and never come to know one another; when we know more about what is happening in Bangladesh than we know about what is happening in the next block; when families are scattered across the country and even the world; when people live in apartment complexes for years and never say hello to their daily companions in the building elevator. In a social climate like that, it is so easy to have our worlds shrink to the size of our own desks and our own houses and our own agendas. We call it individualism, but the fact is that it is really self-centeredness. “No one is to pursue what they judge better for themselves, but instead, what they judge better for someone else” (RB 72:7). Each of us has the responsibility in Benedictine spirituality to take care of the others as well as to take care of ourselves.
There is no question that my goal in life must be to develop the best in myself to the best of my ability. The question is, Why? In Benedicitine spirituality, the answer seems to be that we grow to full stature in life in order to carry someone else. Perhaps, in fact, we never grow to full stature until we have learned to carry someone else. That’s the value of uniqueness and that’s the meaning of responsibility. That’s why spoiling children is such a sad gift to give the child. How else, if not in their homes, will they ever learn that their lives are not for themselves alone?
That’s what the visiting monk learned at the bedside of Abba Arsenius and that’s what the musicians teach us every Sunday morning as they use multiple instruments, sophisticated and simple, together and alone to bring us all to fullness of life.
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Hospitality: The Unboundaried Heart
All guests who present themselves are to be welcomed as Christ, for he himself will say: “I was a stranger and you welcomed me” (Matt. 25:35).
Once a guest has been announced, the superior and the community are to meet the guest with all the courtesy of love. First of all, they are to pray together and thus be united in peace….
Great care and concern are to be shown in receiving poor people and pilgrims, because in them more particularly Christ is received; our very awe of the rich guarantees them special respect.
RB 53:1; 3-4; 15
Lots of things have changed since I entered this monastery. We used to wear medieval clo
thes and now we use contemporary dress. We used to be silent at meals and now we talk. We used to pray in Latin and now we pray in English. We used to engage in only one ministry, teaching, and now we try to contribute to the upbuilding of the Kingdom in multiple ways. I have learned to expect things to change in every area and most things have. With one notable exception. From the first day I entered this community up to this very morning, we have had our own fresh baked bread.
I used to wonder about that. After all, you can buy bread just as cheaply as you can bake it these days. And to see anyone put all of that effort into such a thankless task seemed sometimes to be a pity. Every day, the flour is mixed in large, heavy, metal mixing bowls and the dough is patted into single loaves for baking and dropped into baking tins and rubbed by hand with butter and shoved into the heavy ovens. Despite all the work and time and physical effort it took to prepare it all, the bread is long gone by evening, day after day, year after year. What is there to show for all that work?
Then, to make matters worse it seemed, with commercial companies all over the country offering to perform the service of packaging and sorting wafers for us, the community chose instead to make its own Eucharistic bread every day as well. Now this is a busy community, with multiple responsibilities and heavy work loads and crowded schedules. Why would anyone add one more thing to days that are already overfull, especially since the task could just as well be done by someone else, anyone else?
Finally, with money low and little to spare ourselves, the community discovered that the city around us in this declining industrial area was full of hungry men and anemic women and undernourished children—the homeless, the unemployed, the working poor. And, one by one, we opened a soup kitchen and a food pantry and a food bank. Once a year now, the sisters empty their rooms of all the clothes and things they don’t need and send those to the food pantry, too, to be given with the food bags so that joy and beauty and a sense of care accompany the staples. Some people call it foolish. We can’t possibly feed everyone who is hungry. The few things we have to give—a picture here, a blouse there, a knickknack perhaps, a small tape recorder maybe—won’t fill anyone’s home or add much to their barren lives. They are essentially useless things in a hopeless situation. It all seems to be an impossible venture. And where will the money and gifts come from to keep it up?
Then, someplace along the line I came upon one of the sayings of the Desert Monastics that explained the situation:
One day someone handed round a few dried figs to the monastics in the community. Because they were not worth anything, no one took any to Abba Arsenius in order not to offend him. Learning of it, the old man did not come that day to the community gathering, saying, “You have cast me out by not giving me a share of the blessing which God has given you and which, apparently, I was not worthy to receive.” Everyone who heard of this was edified. Then, one of the monastics took him the small, shriveled up, dried out figs and Arsenius came to the community synaxis [prayer] again with joy.
I discovered, you see, that real Benedictinism requires us to pour ourselves out for the other, to give ourselves away, to provide the staples of life, both material and spiritual, for one another. The question is not whether what we have to give is sufficient for the situation or not. The question is simply whether or not we have anything to give. That’s what hospitality is all about. Not abundance and not totality. Just sharing. Real sharing.
Hospitality has become very organized and very antiseptic in the United States today. We take into our lives only the friends we’ve made on the job, or the neighbors we know, or strangers that someone else can vouch for, but not the unknown other or the social outcast or the politically unacceptable foreigner. We don’t simply bake bread and pass it around freely: to the old black woman who cleans the halls, or the stranger who just moved in next door, or the young welfare mother who brings her food stamps to shop in the same supermarket we do. We have to be much more careful than that in a society where people are not safe in their own homes or welcome in their own neighborhoods or secure in the subways of their own cities. So, is hospitality an impossible art for this time and this culture?
To the people of the ancient Middle East whose lives were literally a desert, hospitality was a survival mechanism. Like boaters who never ignore the needs of another boater because there is no telling on the high seas when they themselves will need help, the people of the desert—glad for company that brought psychological nourishment and aware of their own possible peril of being in a place someday with high sun and no water—opened their tents and begged strangers to come in. The Scriptures are full of examples of hospitality: Abraham and Sarah open their tent to passing strangers; the Samaritan cares for the wounded on the side of the road; Lot shows greater commitment to the guest than to his own family.
The Rule of Benedict—written at a time of great social migration and personal peril, long before there were campgrounds or large motels—charged the monastery to “receive guests as Christ” and to take special care of “the poor and of pilgrims.” “Guests,” Benedict wrote, “are never wanting in the monastery” (RB 53). The monastery, in other words, was to be no bastion against the outside world. On the contrary, the monastery was to be a place of comfort and of solace and of safety for everyone. The monastery was the place where anyone would be welcomed, where rich and poor alike could come and find seats side by side despite the world around them where status counted dearly and classism was a given.
Benedictine spirituality says that we must continue to beg the stranger to come into our lives because in the stranger may come the only honesty and insight we can get in our plastic worlds. The abbot is instructed to listen to the criticism of the stranger because, the Rule teaches the community, “God may have sent that one for that very reason” (RB 61). The problem is that we may need to learn to practice hospitality of a different kind these days to get the same results.
In our world it is easy to let the Holiday Inns and the City Missions carry the burden of caring for strangers and absorbing the flow of life that teems at the gates outside of our offices and stands along the far fringes of our backyards and our neighborhoods and our churches, quietly present but barely seen and seldom noticed. Benedictine spirituality says that to become whole ourselves we must learn to let the other in, if for no other reason than to stretch our own vision, to take responsibility for the world by giving to it out of our own abundance, to make the world safe by guarding its peoples ourselves.
The world, it seems, has never been more in need of hospitality. Refugees roam the world displaced for political reasons by leaders who live in marble houses, while the soldiers they deploy die in ditches and the people they terrorize run from country to country seeking peace and safety for their children and human dignity for themselves. Tent cities are being built in the United States of America for the unemployed homeless of the richest nation in the world. Children flock to the cities in droves, out of abusive homes and divided homes and poor homes and good homes that simply can’t handle them. The elderly are abandoned in old houses with leaking roofs and dirty windows and uncut yards. Foreigners are named enemy simply because they are foreign, apparently, and do not think or live or look like we do.
And who cares? And who does anything about it? Indeed, hospitality is the missing value of the twentieth century. Churches that promote the Sanctuary movement are prosecuted. People who employ undocumented aliens trying to clothe and feed themselves by good, honest work are fined and jailed. Yet the masses of the world are surging across our television screens and across our borders looking for hope but burdened with despair because hospitality is now defined simply as graciousness in high places and the affluent reception of the affluent.
The question is, Why? And the answer is that the biblical value of hospitality has been domesticated and is now seen more as one of the social graces than as a spiritual act and a holy event.
Like the monastics under Abba Arsenius we do not share our figs with ev
eryone anymore, either because we have decided that the things we have are too good for the poor who need them or too simple for the rich who don’t.
We have to learn how to take people in again or the poverty and the political hatred and the decimation of peoples and the turning of our own lives into icy islands will never end. We must learn in this century again to open our minds and open our hearts and open our lives and open our talents and open our hands to others. That is the hospitality for which the Rule of Benedict calls.
Benedict called always for an open mind. That’s why Scripture reading is such an important part of Benedictine life. The fact is that Jesus was an assault on every closed mind in Israel. To those who thought that illness was a punishment for sin, Jesus called for openness. To those who considered tax collectors incapable of salvation, Jesus called for openness. To those who believed that the Messiah had to be a military figure, Jesus was a call to openness. It is impossible, in other words, to become immersed in the Benedictine spirituality of lectio, the deep and reflective reading of the Scriptures, and not be called to the hospitality of the mind that makes room for the AIDS patient or the politburo member or the notion of nuclear disarmament. Until we make room in our minds for the ideas of the gospel, there will be no way to get anything through the barriers of our own fears or prejudices into our lives.
Benedict is very specific about hospitality of the heart. The “bruised reed” is never to be broken. The knocker at the gate is always to be met “with all the gentleness that comes from the fear of God” and “provided a prompt answer with the warmth of love” (RB 66). Honor, courtesy, and love are the hallmarks Benedict requires for hospitality of the heart (RB 52).
Wisdom Distilled from the Daily Page 11