Wisdom Distilled from the Daily

by Joan Chittister

  Monastic spirituality is an antidote to license. In the monastic community, everybody exists for the other. The porter is to receive the guest with warmth and peace always (RB 66). Nothing is to be done without the permission of the abbot (RB 5). The Rule is preeminent (RB 1). Everyone, even the sick and the fragile, are to receive a community assignment, to make their contribution to the good of the whole (RB 35). The definition of authority in the monastic mind, then, is accountability and responsibility. A good many marriages, a good many businesses, a good many families, a good many nations could use this same definition.

  One of the Western world’s most serious problems is the tension between the group and the individual. Our culture trains people in individualism and then condemns them to live forever in groups, large groups. The Rule of Benedict, however, trains people to live in community. The question is, Why? Isn’t the eremitical life the life of complete perfection and total dedication to God? And the answer is, yes it is, for some people. But not for most, and then only after they have learned the virtues that come from life in community (RB 1). Most social beings, however, are meant to find their sanctification by living under the authority of society. It is the community that forms community values and virtues in me. It is the community that provides the arena for mutual support. It is from the community that I get an example of life lived well. It is in the community that teaching becomes real. It is in the community that authority is meant to become a gift rather than an instrument of oppression. It is only in the community that I really learn to listen to the voice of God in one another and to see the face of God in the other as well as in my own. It is only in community that I can learn to wield patience as well as power. It is only in community that I can learn to obey the command to serve one another.

  The Rule is quite clear about it all. Benedict writes, “This message of mine is for you, then, if you are ready to give up your own will, once and for all, and armed with the strong and noble weapons of obedience to do battle for the true King, Christ the Lord” (RB Prologue). Monastic spirituality is not principally for the sake of personal salvation or contemplative withdrawal. Monastic spirituality is meant to bring the reign of Christ to the world around us through a life of community consciousness of the will of God.

  The spirituality of authority, then, is a spirituality based on listening to those around me. The monastic listens to the gospel and to privileged others—the prioress, the children, the spouse, the management—and to the Rule and to life around them. The monastic listens, and listens, and listens. The monastic listens to God, to the community, to the world in order to grow beyond the limits that clamor for satisfaction in the confusion of wants and whims.

  Monastic spirituality rejects a static concept of perfection. Perfection, the monastic learns, is not something that has to do with seeing a commitment to obedience and authority as a variation on life in a military barracks. On the contrary, the monastic learns young to realize that the whole of life must be open to the possibility of change, always and everywhere, because God cannot be defined by yesterday God is constantly revealing the fullness of God, more today than yesterday, more tomorrow than today. To find God, then, we must be always ready to bend our hearts and change our paths and open our minds. That’s why dependence is static and license is blind. And that’s why domination is destructive.

  The third negative view of authority, domination, says there is only one right way, mine. Worse than that, domination says that I have nothing to learn from anyone else and that you have nothing to teach me. The person who attempts to dominate others has great gaping human needs for security and control. If the world does not go together the way I want it, then the world is wrong. I want this schedule and this menu and this arrangement. Anything other is less than perfect. But that’s a crippled and smothered way to live. It cuts off surprise. It stunts growth. It eliminates the need for the future. It says that whatever the world is, it is frozen.

  What’s more, the function of domination is to keep the rest of the world small as well. No one else is allowed to have vision either. No one else is permitted to fail. No one else is given the opportunity to learn by experience. The world is to step to my beat. Everybody else exists for me. My wife is to make my life comfortable. My husband is there to give me status and make me feel important. My friend is supposed to like what I like, do what I do, think what I think and move when I move.

  Domination, in other words, does not direct people, it destroys them. But the Rule of Benedict says, “The Abbot is not to disturb the flock entrusted to him nor make any unjust arrangements, as though he had the power to do whatever he wished” (RB 63). And he said that in a period of Roman patriarchy when men had control over the lives of their children and slaves.

  Benedictine spirituality sees authority as a charism, not a privilege. It sees obedience as an act of community, not a deprivation of life or a diminishment of the person. Benedictine spirituality, then, gives the lie to dependence and license and domination. Like the Teacher who tells us that Truth comes from being able to admit that we may be wrong, Benedictine spirituality teaches that dependence or domination or license are not to rule us.

  Dependence says that everybody counts but me. License says that nobody counts but me. And domination says that I have the right to tell everybody else what counts at all. It’s into those skewed perspectives of life and authority that Benedictine spirituality sheds light and gives new hope.

  The Rule of Benedict calls for a life of conversion. One of the Benedictine vows signed on the altar is the vow of Conversatio Morum, or a promise to take on a lifestyle and values and attitudes that are different from the life-style and values and attitudes that permeate the society around us. We are to be gospel people. We are not to be our own law; we are not to be the centers of our own universe; we are not to be unaware, unconcerned, unlistening to all the others. We are to be the formers of human community, and we are to be formed by it as well. That is the function of authority.

  Authority is more than the preservation of law or the maintenance of order. Authority is the call to growth.

  It is not the function of spouses to control one another. It is not the obligation of parents simply to restrict children. It is not the responsibility of national leaders to restrain the nation. It is the responsibility of the authorities of one generation to develop the people of the next, not to turn them into perpetual children, certified robots, licensed clones.

  The Rule of Benedict says quite clearly that the older must love the younger, that the young must honor their elders, that authority must be delegated (RB 71). Advice must be taken from the entire group “starting with the youngest members first” (RB 3:10). This teaches newer members not to be inhibited or nonresponsive or unconcerned, perhaps, but the structure was also designed to let the young hear their more experienced elders reflect aloud on the fresh and untried opinions they so eagerly gave. As the young listen, their own ideas and understandings are sharpened in preparation for the day when the generation yet to come is their responsibility.

  The Rule says the responsibility of the abbot is to study the Scriptures so that he can “bring forth both new things and old” (RB 64:8). The role of the authority in monastic spirituality is clear: Authority is meant to call. Authority is meant to enable. Authority is meant to raise questions. Authority is meant to convert. Authority is meant to shape us in the values of Christian life. Authority wielded in any other manner is not authority at all, it is sheer egotism and potential tyranny. There is no room in Benedictine spirituality for the domineering father or the overprotective mother or the prima donna director. Authority is the tool that is meant to lead us all to the fullness of self that is rooted in the fullness of community.

  By recognizing authorities in our lives we run the risk of conversion, of learning from someone else. Conversion says that creation goes on creating and that none of us are meant to thwart the dynamic character of the Christian life. In every century, of course, someone tr
ies. After the revolutions, there were those who tried to restore the monarchies; after Vatican II, there were those who would have preferred to live in the spirit of Vatican I; after the rise of the women’s movement, there were those who wanted to restore the patriarchal family. And all in the name of authority. But the authority that leads to conversion is always an authority that calls us beyond a limited present to a life of new gospel insights and new possibilities.

  Conversion, in other words, is a willingness to let go, to be led beyond where we are, to where we can be. Conversion is an invitation not to cling to past works, to past relationships, to past circumstances. Those are the idols of our lives; those are the places where we have paused along the way. Conversion opens us to new questions.

  Conversion, then, demands self-discipline; it presumes struggle; it needs the guidance of authority Someplace, sometime, we have to learn to trust that the direction authority gives and the questions authority raises and the call to growth that authority inspires is a call to the fulfillment of the self, not an exercise in servility for its own sake.

  Those are good words for parents, important words for institutions, decisive words for nations, and determining words for the Church. What we need in our times are spiritual adults. Dependence, license, and domination, the Teacher knew well, are no substitutes for the self-contained, self-controlled, self-directed person who can withstand the vagaries of life and not crumble, who can withstand the pressures of life and not succumb, who can regard the forces of life and not be seduced by anything less than self brought to maturity and community brought to wholeness. We each have something to offer and offer it we must.

  That’s what the spirituality of Benedictine authority is all about, and that’s what family life, the country, and the Church need more now in our time than ever. To allow ourselves to be other in the name of obedience to any authority that would lead us to be less is to betray them all.

  “Listen with the heart” (RB Prologue: 1), the Rule of Benedict says. Listen with feeling and listen with compassion. Listen with values and listen with concern. Listen for the truth of a thing, not for the power of a thing. Obey what makes your heart more human, not necessarily what makes your position more secure. Listen with a critical ear for the sound of the gospel in everything you do. And don’t do what isn’t a gospel act, no matter who says so, no matter who orders it, no matter how sacred the institution that demands it. Or else the Holocaust. Or else the Inquisition. Or else Watergate and Irangate. Or else power before truth.

  The modern world is a battleground between dependence and authority, between license and authority, between domination and real authority Benedictine spirituality insists that blind obedience, obedience to the lawgiver rather than to the law, is the lowest form of service. And Benedictine spirituality is a standard for lawgivers too. Benedictine authority is authority full of respect and full of humility, open to questions and intent on vision, intent on growth rather than on control.

  The world and its families, the nations and their peoples have never needed a Benedictine spirituality of authority more.

  12

  Stability: Revelation of the Many Faces of God

  The workshop where we are to toil faithfully at all these tasks is the enclosure of the monastery and stability in the community.

  When one is to be received, they come before the whole community in the oratory and promise stability, fidelity to monastic-life, and obedience.

  RB 4:78; 58:17

  Everywhere you look in our monastery there’s a cross, on the bell tower outside the large front entrance for all the world to see; on the chapel doors; on the wall behind the prioress’s desk. When I was a young sister in the community, I think I would have preferred more exciting markers—an elegant oil painting, perhaps, or a statue of the Ascension done in gothic beauty, or something abstract and provocative. Not that there weren’t plenty of each around, of course, but the first sight a visitor got was always the cross; the most prominent thing was always the cross; the thing at the center of the most symbolic places of the community— the front door, the chapel, the refectory, the prioress’s office—was always the cross. A little old-fashioned, I thought. A little macabre. After all, we have to keep our eyes on the bright spots of life and beware the darker aspects of religion. And I still think that’s true. To a point.

  The fact is, though, that as life goes on, it becomes clearer and clearer that the cross is not a dark aspect of religion. It is, on the contrary, the one hope we have that our own lives can move through difficulty to triumph. It’s the one thing that enables us to hang on and not give up when hanging on seems impossible and giving up seems imperative. The cross is our one proof of human possibility. The cross says very clearly that things will work out if we work them out and that whatever is, is important to our life’s fulfillment. The cross says that we can rise if we can only endure.

  Now that is not what I learn from the culture around me. In this day and age everything is expected to be instant, nothing is to be endured. We’re a society of pop-up tarts and instant cocoa and microwave ovens and same day surgery. Americans are instructed that they must never tolerate a cold or a backache or acid indigestion. And we want things when we want them. We wear headphones to create our own private little worlds. We run our lives on timers for the VCR and timers for the lights and timers for the oven in order to create our own private little schedules. We buy TV dinners so everyone in the family can live their own private little lives. We change schools and jobs and homes as casually as we once changed clothes. We are born in one state, raised in another, married in a third, and retire in a fourth. Everything we touch is immediate, private, and fluid. Life, for us, is very, very personal and very, very mobile. Our lives are so mobile and so private, in fact, that loneliness and fragmentation and selfishness are endemic to the culture. We “mind our own business” while people cheat and lie and die around us. We fail to make connections between this little suburb and the world, my life and the health of the planet, this policy and the fate of ages and peoples yet to come.

  When my novice mistress insisted that nothing be left on the novitiate table overnight, I didn’t make many connections either. When I was assigned to live with people I didn’t know, I didn’t understand why connecting with them was important to me either. When my first local superior gave each of us one hanger and one hanger only in the community cupboard, I didn’t understand why my needs didn’t determine the allotment either. When I was told to work with people whose methods I didn’t understand and whose personalities countered mine, I didn’t know why it was necessary for me to have anything to do with them either. When we were told that typewriters could not be used in the bedroom areas, I didn’t see why they shouldn’t be either. After all, I had grown up an only child. The world around me belonged to me. Things went my way if only because there was no other way for anything to go. The turf was mine to own and shape and control. I was a world unto myself, all others need beware.

  Then, as the years went by, I began to understand the spirituality of stability that was so clearly a monastic quality. The Desert Monastics explained it this way:

  Abba Poemen said of Abba John that he had prayed to God to take his passions away from him so that he might become free from care. In fact, Abba John went and told one of the elders this: “I find myself in peace, without an enemy,” he said. And the elder said to him, “Then go and beseech God to stir up warfare within you so that you may regain the affliction and humility that you used to have, for it is by warfare that the soul makes progress.” So he besought God and when warfare eame, he no longer prayed that it might be taken away, but said, “Lord, give me the strength for the fight” (John the Dwarf, section no. 13.).

  Another story that reflects the spirituality of stability comes from Cassian. Cassian wrote that Abba John, abbot of a great monastery, went to Abba Paesius who had been living for forty years very far off in the desert. As John was very fond of Paesius and could therefore spea
k freely with him, John said to him, “What good have you done by living here in retreat for so long, and not being easily disturbed by anyone?” And Abba Paesius said, “Since I have lived in solitude the sun has never seen me eating.” But Abba John said to him, “As for me, as long as I have lived in community, the sun has never seen me angry” (Cassian, section no. 4.).

  It is easy to be even-tempered in private, in other words. It is easy to be virtuous alone. It is easy to be strong when untried. It is easy to win when there is nothing to endure. It is also easy to be superficial and self-centered and characterless. It is also easy to run from what I may most need to confront in life if I am ever to be whole. Monastic stability, you see, is concerned more with depth than with comfort.

  Benedictine stability is a promise to meet life head-on. Monastic stability deals directly with three things: centeredness, commitment, and relationships.

  There are some things in life that cannot be avoided: death, illness, change, personal expectations. What each of them does to us depends a great deal on the way we have allowed ourselves to deal with lesser things. The purpose of stability is to center us in something greater than ourselves so that nothing lesser than ourselves can possibly sweep us away.

  Stability says that where I am is where God is for me. More than that, stability teaches that whatever the depth of the dullness or the difficulties around me, I can, if I will simply stay still enough of heart, find God there in the midst of them.