Wisdom Distilled from the Daily

by Joan Chittister

  It is so easy to give clothes to the poor but refuse to honor the ones to whom we have given the goods. Who says “Pardon me” to the down-and-outers who hang at the kitchen doors and garbage cans of our cities? Who sits and talks to the unskilled workers who clean the office buildings of our towns? Who makes friends with the people on the other side of town, the ones who aren’t “our kind of folk?”

  Everyone—everyone—is received as Christ. Everyone receives a warm answer—on the phone, at the door, in the office. Sarcasm has no room here. Put-downs have no room here. One-upmanship has no room here. Classism has no room here. The Benedictine heart is to be a place without boundaries, a place where the truth of the oneness of all things shatters all barriers, a point where all the differences of the world meet and melt, where Jew and Gentile, slave and free, woman and man all come together as equals.

  But whatever happens to the heart is the beginning of revolution. When I let strange people and strange ideas into my heart, I am beginning to shape a new world. Hospitality of the heart could change American domestic policies. Hospitality of the heart could change American foreign policy. Hospitality of the heart could make my world a world of potential friends rather than a world of probable enemies.

  Yet, Benedictine hospitality is more than simply thinking new thoughts or feeling new feelings about people we either thought harshly of before or, more likely, failed to think about at all. Benedictine hospitality demands that we open our lives to others as well. Benedictine hospitality demands the extra effort, the extra time, the extra care that stretches beyond and above the order of the day.

  Opening our lives to others is another dimension of Benedictine hospitality for our times. When Benedict wrote the Rule, the local village was the center of every person’s universe. To this day, there are small mountaintop villages in Italy that are basically untouched by the outside world. No one goes into them much and no one leaves them. But today it does not matter if you and I ever leave our villages or not. Today the world comes, unbidden but persistent, to us. Television has become our window to the world. Newspapers and magazines, our eyes. We know that the poor are poor and that the elderly are lonely and that the children are hungry. We know that the politicians are declaring wars and that younger generations are dying in them. We know it’s happening. We don’t often know why.

  And that’s where we fail in hospitality. We are not opening our own lives to the plight of those around us. We don’t understand the situations and we don’t care.

  Real hospitality for our time requires that, instead of flipping the channel or turning the page, we try to determine what it is about our own lives that is affecting these others. We have to wonder how we can help the poor at the doorstep who live thousands of miles away. Hospitality says that the problem is mine, not someone else’s. It is my door and my heart upon which these people are knocking for attention.

  In some places of this world, drought is destroying food supplies for years to come. But every time we use spray cans that emit the substances that burn holes in the ozone layer we ourselves contribute to the drought. It is not that the poor of the world are suffering. It is that the poor of the world who are crying out for help are of our making. The garbage that the world can’t dispose of is made up of the Styrofoam cups we use and the tin cans we’ve discarded rather than recycled. It is what we spray on our gardens and inject into our animals that is ruining the national health.

  Real hospitality for our time requires that we consider how to take these concerns into our own lives so that others can live a safe life too.

  When guests came to Benedict’s monastery, they were fed and given lodging and cared for like one of the family. That took time and effort. That was hospitality of the open hand. It is not enough simply to change our minds about things or to come to feel compassion for something that had never touched us before or even to change our own way of life to let in the concerns of others. Real hospitality lies in bending some efforts to change things, to make a haven for the helpless, to be voice for the voiceless. We have to learn to take our own sense of home to others. What I do not want for my own family and friends, I do not want for others; what I would do for them, I will do for others:

  If I would not serve poisoned food to those I love, then I will write postcards to our legislators asking them to see that others are not poisoned by the food production process either.

  I will volunteer at the food bank or soup kitchen once a month to see that others are fed.

  I will join a group that is interested in ecology.

  I will send money I earned the hard way to groups that need support if the world is to get to be a better place for all of us.

  I will, in other words, do something.

  I cannot go on thinking that nodding to neighbors in the parking lot is hospitality. I cannot fool myself into thinking that being nice to those who are my kind and my class suffices for the moral dimensions of hospitality.

  Hospitality means we take people into the space that is our lives and our minds and our hearts and our work and our efforts. Hospitality is the way we come out of ourselves. It is the first step toward dismantling the barriers of the world. Hospitality is the way we turn a prejudiced world around, one heart at a time.

  There will be racism in the world until you and I begin to take the other races in. There will be prejudice, until you and I take the other groups in. There will be war, until you and I begin to take the enemy in. There will be classism, until you and I begin to take the other segments of society into our own worlds and lives and parties and neighborhoods.

  The Rule of Benedict is a tonic for human separations. Benedict takes in the poor and the pilgrim, the young and the old, the rich and the deprived, the ones of our own family of faith and the passersby. And every guest is received with the same warmth and the same care, the same dignity and the same attention.

  The Rule of Benedict is also sensible about it. The monastics of the place are told to greet the guests but not to linger in talking to them. We all have our own lives to live, our own obligations to meet, our own schedules to run. Hospitality is not an excuse for lack of organization or purpose in our own circumstances. No, hospitality is the willingness to be interrupted and inconvenienced so that others can get on with their lives as well.

  The clerks who ignore people at store counters, the teachers who ignore the parents of the children they teach, the wealthy who never even see the doorman or the cabdriver or the cook, the powerful who never hear the powerless, the religious ministers who are too busy to minister, are all examples of a world deprived of the spirit of hospitality.

  Once you understand all of that, you understand without being told why the monastery bakes fresh bread daily and why the Eucharistic host is done in our own kitchen and why we opened a soup kitchen and a food bank and a food pantry and why we have a community giveaway once a year. Hospitality doesn’t exist unless we go out of ourselves for someone else at least once a day. There is no hospitality where I can’t think a new thought and see a new perspective and talk to a new person and give part of myself away day after day after day Hospitality is one of those things that has to be constantly practiced or it won’t be there for the rare occasion. The breads are the lifelong symbols of that, the perpetual reminders, the constant measure of a hospitality that is trying to be real at every level and always.

  The disciples left Abba Arsenius out of the distribution of figs because they had forgotten that hospitality is the act of giving what you have to everyone in sight. It is not a series of grand gestures at controlled times. It is not a finishing-school activity. It is an act of the recklessly generous heart.

  11

  Obedience: Holy Responsibility

  It is love that impels them to pursue everlasting life; therefore, they are eager to take the narrow road of which Jesus says: “Narrow is the road that leads to life” (Matt. 7:14). They no longer live by their own judgment, giving in to their whims and appetites; rather they walk
according to another’s decisions and directions, choosing to live in monasteries. . . .

  This very obedience, however, will be acceptable to God and agreeable to others only if compliance with what is commanded is not cringing or sluggish or half-hearted, but free from any grumbling or any reaction of unwillingness. For the obedience shown to superiors is given to God.

  RB 5:10-15

  The vow ceremony in our community is an awesome one. The sister about to make vows stands up in the midst of the community gathered in chapel and announces her intention to join it forever. When the prioress calls her, she brings her vow paper to the altar step where the prioress is standing, reads her vow profession aloud, and then carries the document to the place on the altar where together the newly professed sister and the prioress sign and seal it. Finally, the two walk back around the altar. But this time, it is the prioress who carries the vow document and places it on the altar while the new monastic sings three times in alternation with the community, “Uphold me, O God, and I shall live and do not fail me in my hope.”

  It’s a very moving and a very symbolic event. It says that a person has freely and independently chosen to put herself at the disposal of a group and “under a Rule and a prioress” for the sake of the gospel. A woman comes to the altar alone but leaves it as part of a community. A woman makes a decision to put herself in the hands of someone who will now become part of all the major decisions of the rest of her life. In other words, a woman stands up in public and says, “1 am not an entity unto myself.” And then, suddenly, she is stronger for it and the gospel is safer for it too.

  It’s a far cry from rugged individualism. The questions are: Is it normal? Is it healthy? Is it natural? Is it good? After all, what happens to personal development when individuals give away the full control of his or her own lives?

  The answer, of course, is that no one really has full control of their own lives. We’re all limited by something. The difference is that some people decide what they will allow to control them and some people simply find themselves controlled by the whims and fancies of life. All of us meet and wrestle with authority. The only question is to what authority have I surrendered and how do I myself use authority when I have it. Authority and self-determination are two of the major problems of the spiritual life. Are we our own masters or not?

  The Benedictine answer is a simple one. Benedictine communities cannot be pictured correctly by either the pyramid or the circle. Benedictine communities are not meant to be either hierarchical or egalitarian. On the contrary. Benedictine communities are better pictured as a wheel with a hub and spokes. In the Benedictine community, there is a center to which all the members relate while they all relate to one another.

  The role of authority in Benedictine spirituality is to unify the community and to direct its attention to God who is the center of life of each and all of them. Benedictine authority is not for its own sake. Obedience for the sake of obedience can be sheer domination. Benedictine authority is not militaristic. The role of authority in the Benedictine community is not to make wives and children and monastics jump through spiritual hoops in order to prove their willingness to Jump. No, Benedictine authority is designed to call us to our best selves by calling us, not to a system, but to the gospel. Monastics of another time and place demonstrated the difference well:

  Once upon a time a visitor came to the monastery looking for the purpose and meaning of life.

  The Teacher said to the visitor, “If what you seek is Truth, there is one thing you must have above all else.”

  “I know,” the visitor said. “To find Truth I must have an overwhelming passion for it.”

  “No,” the Teacher said. “In order to find Truth, you must have an unremitting readiness to admit you may be wrong.”

  The story is a clear paradigm of Benedictine life. The fact is that the person centered in Christ lives in a system in order to transcend the system. It is the ability to think thoughts other than our own, other than the past, other than the safe, other than the acceptable that will lead us eventually to truth. But to do that we have to learn to deal with our need to control. We have to learn not to be authoritarian with one another. We have to learn to discipline our constant urges to license. We have to learn, in other words, to listen to others and hear their truth.

  Community, the story implies, depends on our ability to let things be what they are so that by learning from the struggles and frustrations of the day, we can all gain the fullness of life of which we are capable. What we need to learn is that everything will not always be to our liking in life, but if we can learn to let people do what they need to do, life will be good nevertheless. We lose the chance to find truth when we give the other either too much or too little control over our lives. When we become totally dependent on the ideas and directions of another in a blind and unexamined way or when we set out to dominate the lives of others ourselves, that is when our authority problems really begin.

  When I live only for the sake of an authority figure, that is dependence. Real truth does not come from swallowing even holiness whole. That is, at best, spiritual childishness. Real truth comes from following the directions of another because my own heart and mind and soul know that no matter what effort this demands of me, it requires more integrity and ends in more good than my own lesser way can ever gain.

  When I live only to resist authority, that is license. Truth does not come from sheer resistance. To be against something just to be against it, even if I am right, is not truth. It is only self gone wild with a crippling kind of isolation that will eventually make me deaf to whatever is best for me in life. When I do not have a clearly better way, then another’s way will not only do, it will develop me beyond the level of my own limited lights.

  When I live only to wield authority over others, that is not insight and leadership; that is domination. Truth can never come without sharing authority with other members of the community. The truth that I suppress in others will limit my own growth.

  None of those attitudes toward authority—dependence, license or domination—are healthy from a Benedictine point of view. The first negative view of authority, dependence, is simply a way to avoid responsibility and look holy at the same time. When I need the approval of others to justify every step of my life; when I lay on others the burden of my own decisions; when I need someone else’s permission to do what I feel should be done; when I need someone else’s direction to do what I know must be done, that’s not obedience, that’s immaturity. Or it’s manipulation. Or it’s very, very sad.

  The Rule of Benedict does not call for dependence. Monastics are to “listen with the ear of the heart” and then “labor” to do what is required of them (RB Prologue). Obedience, in other words, lies in listening and in laboring and in knowing what is required of us. The manager, for instance, who can’t make a decision without first checking to see if everyone agrees and everyone approves and everyone is sure it will work is not necessarily being obedient to the group. One of the functions of leadership is to lead, and weak managers may simply check and check and, check with others because they are not capable of leading when it is required of them to lead. Benedict says that in matters of importance the abbot or prioress is to ask everyone in the community, “starting with the youngest,” and then the abbot or prioress is to “do what seems best” (RB 3).

  The asking, it is clear, is not for the sake of dependence; the asking is for insight and information. The responsibility remains.

  When social approval is such a priority in my life that stepping to a different drummer is beyond me, dependence becomes a weight around my neck. The crowd never questions nuclear weapons; how can 1? The group laughs loudest at ethnic jokes, so mustn’t I? The crowd buys the latest and the best; shouldn’t I? In instances like these, it must be internal authority that counts or I will be battered by wind after wind of social change and social pressure. Who I am and what I stand for will never be clear and never be witness. I will sim
ply be at the mercy of other people’s principles.

  Dependence is not a social nicety that fits me for company or proves my neighborliness. It is an obstacle to psychological growth. The dependent person becomes the other instead of him or herself. Dependence is not a virtue. It is a substitute for character. To say, “My husband won’t allow me to . . .” may be to fail as a wife, if for no other reason than it may signal my failure to become a fully adult person. There is a world of difference between “We talked it over and decided that I wouldn’t . . .” and “1 asked but he won’t let me.” On the public level, likewise, “My country, right or wrong . . .” is not patriotism. It is abdication of the responsibilities of citizenship. It allows politicians to make decisions about the welfare of this generation and of generations to come without the benefit of my experience and concerns. It says, let someone else be blamed.

  Responsibility is obedience in the best sense of the word. Servility is obedience in the worst sense of the word. One is interdependence; the other is dependence. When the Teacher says, “To find Truth you must have an unremitting readiness to admit you may be wrong,” he means that fullness of life depends on keeping our hearts open to finding God, again and again, not on fashioning for ourselves an eternal right way and then clinging to it. Benedict warns, “There are ways which some call right that in the end plunge into the depths of hell” (RB 7). The obedience Benedict wants is not dependence. It is obedience to the will of God and to the Spirit at work in all of us.

  The second negative view of authority, license, is, however, a skewed notion of independence. License says that I am accountable only to myself But that is not only sinful, it is absurd. When I drive a car, I am not responsible simply for myself, I am responsible for every other driver on the road. When I cook, I have the moral obligation to be concerned for everyone who will eat what I prepare. When I work on an assembly line, everybody else’s work depends on mine. The whole world, in other words, is an organic whole, a system of interlocking parts meant both to hold me up and to stretch me at the same time. License is an attempt to sabotage the system, to be my own small world, to be my own measure of meaning in life.