Wisdom Distilled from the Daily

by Joan Chittister

  Seeing what he had done, the monastics of that place bowed before him, asking him to tell them why he had acted in that way. And the old man said to them, “I did this as an example: whoever has not worked will not receive a reward from God.”

  My novice mistress was right after all. The spiritual life was something to be worked at, not something to be hoped for. Working at it required discipline and monastic mindfulness.

  The question is, How can mindfulness possibly be achieved in the midst of a life full of pressure and full of care? The “Instruments of Good Works” are clear. The point of a Benedictine spirituality is not to make life unusual, not to make life strange or foreign or rigid or mysterious. The purpose of Benedictine spirituality is to make life significant and sacred and full of meaning. If I want to live in the presence of God, there are some preparations to be made. The basic questions of the spiritual life are to determine which ones and how?

  The secret, of course, lies in the Benedictine commitment to conversion. I cannot serve God and mammon, I cannot serve two masters, I cannot be both in the world and of it. I cannot have an authentic spiritual life without working at it. The spiritual life is not a matter of religious sleight of hand. It is not the doing of spiritual tricks that we are about. It is an attitude of mind we must develop. It is a way of walking lightly through things that threaten to bind us or bog us down—that is what a true spirituality implies. It is an asceticism without chains.

  The shock comes when we finally realize that spirituality itself can be a temptation. Benedict speaks clearly about “the evil zeal of bitterness which separates from God and leads to hell” (RB 72:1) and the pitfall of wishing “to be called holy before we are holy” (RB 4:62). The Rule, in other words, teaches us to cling to nothing, to hold everything—even the best of holy things—with a relaxed grasp.

  The great problem of the spiritual life, I soon learned, was not the problem of choosing good from bad. Learning to choose good from bad was, in fact, deceptively easy. There are few who steal, few who lie. There are not too many of us with uncontrollable tempers or destructive jealousies. Most of us would walk away from a fight or refuse to cheat the company or beware of the neighbor-hood gossip. Those things are easy to see as unholy and clear to avoid. No, I soon learned, the real problem of the spiritual life was not rooted in having to learn to avoid evil and choose good; the real problem lay in having to learn to choose good from good. Faced with receiving the unexpected guest and going to prayer, which is better? Confronted with the possibility of making life more comfortable and living it more simply, which is better? Awash in the choice between authority and conscience, which is truly most gospel? Those are the great spiritual decisions. More than that, if we ever do get the choices right, how do we keep them right? How do we establish a family prayer life when the family keeps growing through different schedules at different times? How do we keep giving to charity when our own household has growing wants? How do we deal with the nuclear issue when the company we work for is tied into military contracts and we’re too old to make a job change?

  What does the Rule of Benedict have to say to those things, to the problems of living a spiritual life in a materialistic world? How do we build community in a world that is immersed in itself? What, in other words, is Benedictine asceticism?

  What makes the spiritual life different from any other life? What are we doing that is so different from what everybody else is doing? The answer is it is not what we are doing at all that makes the spiritual life different from the life lived without consciousness. The answer is it is what we are and how we do what we do that is the mark of the spiritual life. It is what we are while we are doing whatever it is we do that makes Benedictine spirituality a gift for all ages.

  When we were young in the community, we were taught to make a bow of the head to everyone we passed in the corridor, not in order to say hello as I had originally assumed, but to recognize the presence of God in them. Elders went through doorways first, not because they were older, but because we were being taught to recognize the guidance available in experience. No one was to have more than three habits and two pairs of shoes, not to play games with the notion of religious poverty— God knows we could easily have all managed to amass more—but to teach us the principle of sufficiency. After awhile, however, the messages, great as they were, got lost in the mechanics of it all because mechanics are not Benedictine. This is precisely the way to say the Office, chapters of Rule imply, but then those chapters end with this comment: “However, if anyone knows a better way, let that be done” (RB 18). This is the daily schedule, the Rule teaches, but “let the abbot make whatever arrangements suit best” (RB 47). See that every monastic has the following personal supplies, the Rule itemizes, and then instructs, “Let those who need more, ask” (RB 55). Clearly the Benedictine life is about a great deal more than lists of community behaviors or daily activities.

  Why no checklist of prioritized virtues or stylized behaviors or rigid rules to accompany spiritual development according to the Rule of Benedict? The answer is simple: “conversion” is more important to the mind of Benedict than captivity to a system, and, in fact, a spiritual system is often a mask for conversion, an avoidance of conversion. Conversion requires us to grow and to change. Systems too easily lock us into yesterday’s virtues.

  So there, without so much as a philosophical explanation or an introduction, in the fourth chapter of the Rule called “The Instruments of Good Works,” Benedict identifies the dimensions of Benedictine life that lead to conversion of heart and breadth of soul and depth of insight and richness of life. The instruments of good works, it seems to me, cover three distinct categories. These are the Benedictine practices of asceticism: the Ten Commandments and the spiritual and corporal works of mercy (RB 4:1–21); the elements of community life (RB 4:22— 33); and a commitment to personal maturity (RB 4:34— 62).

  The commandments of God and the spiritual and corporal works of mercy move us beyond the kind of rarefied atmosphere of canned Christianity so often incorrectly identified with the spiritual life. The spiritual life is a call to live the Christian life well, not simply by denying ourselves or removing ourselves from the vortex of life to follow Christ, as necessary as that is, but also by reaching out to others. The spiritual life is not a matter of not doing evil to the other; the real spiritual life depends on our doing good for the other. If Benedictine spirituality demands that I “relieve the poor and clothe the naked and visit the sick and console the sorrowing” (RB 4:14–18), then my spiritual life is incomplete as long as I make subsidized housing and soup kitchens and AIDS victims and refugees no business of mine. Prayer is simply not enough.

  Benedictine spirituality, in other words, is a spirituality of cosmic connectedness. Time, land, people, things are all to be held in reverent hands, all to be seen as vehicles of the Holy.

  In the second category of the “Instruments of Good Works,” Benedict puts those concepts that enable us to be good community and family members. We are told not to give way to anger, not to plot revenge, not to live a life of deceit, not to be unkind, not to hate our enemies though clearly enemies we may have, not to lack patience and forbearance in times of stress.

  It is such a different approach from the one being presented in the name of me-ness. The Me Generation has learned to “get its anger out,” “to win by intimidation,” to “take care of Number One,” to “nuke the Russians,” to “demand our rights,” to sue our parents and cheat our bosses and get our way, whatever it takes. And when it’s all over, we pay money these days to have psychologists and psychiatrists point out to us that the raging angers we harbor and the roles we play and the subterfuges we plan do a great deal more damage to ourselves than they ever do to the people on whom we wreak them. Benedictine spirituality says we just can’t be whole, we just can’t be free, we just can’t be happy, and we just can’t build the very community life we want, personal and private or global and grand, until we put the self down. B
enedictine spirituality says that we cannot make ourselves our only life agenda. Monastic spirituality softens us. Benedictine spirituality, in other words, says we must learn to live in the midst of the human struggle with quiet souls and open hearts. For the Benedictine, life in community is the great human asceticism. To live community life well is to have all the edges rubbed off, all the rough parts made smooth. There is no need then for disciplines to practice. Life itself is the discipline.

  The third category of the “Instruments of Good Works” is broader still. These are the instruments concerned with personal maturity and spiritual growth (RB 4:34–62). Here we’re told not to be proud or intent on control, to resist addictions, to use our energies well, to avoid negative thoughts and negative speech patterns, to recognize our own creaturehood, to nourish the interior life, to live life with seriousness of purpose and a consciousness of ultimate things, to reach out to others, to love with a love that is nonexploitative, to be a healing presence, and, finally, when we fail and fail and fail in all of these, never to despair. We are being told in a document fifteen hundred years old what any good psychologist, any gentle healer of souls would say today: live life for something greater than your satisfactions and do not let anything or anyone cause you to lose hold on your free and unfettered self.

  Benedictine asceticism is scriptural and communal and committed to psychological and spiritual adulthood. To develop a Benedictine spirituality means to reject a static concept of perfection in which keeping the rules and going through the motions is, at best, an easy way Benedictine spirituality plunges me into human relations that are meant to reveal the will of God to me, to call forth the best in me, to be a source of support and a measure of my personal responsibility. Perhaps the best test of the reality of these in my life is a simple question: In the last three things that bothered me this week, whom did I blame and was it really worth the emotional energy I gave to it? It is time to realize that it is not what happens to me in life that counts, it is what I do with what happens to me that is the measure of my happiness. For some people, life is a challenge; for others, life is a continual crisis, the resolution of which is someone else’s responsibility

  Benedictine conversion, then, is not an assertion of our strength or character. Benedictine spirituality is based on the simple acknowledgment that God will come to life before us and be reborn in us in unexpected ways day after day throughout our entire lives. We must be ready to respond to this God of woods and highways, of gentle breeze and cataclysm, of privacy and crowds—however this Spirit comes. Response is the essence of Benedictine spirituality.

  It is out of this desire to be attentive and present and ready that the externals of monastic spirituality arise as well. As Abba Isaiah meant to point out to the disciples of that day, there are works that for centuries have prepared the monastic mind for the harvest, that without which there may be no harvest at all. For the Benedictine silence, custom, the common table, statio, lectio, manual labor, and stewardship are the tools of the spiritual craft.

  Silence is an element of monastic spirituality that begs for rediscovery in our time. Muzak fills our elevators. Hard rock blares out of cars and boats and apartment house windows. People jog down highways with earphones on and bicycle along city streets balancing boom boxes on their handlebars and sit in airports with transistor radios against their ears, all of them insulated against the world around them and, most of all, protected against the searchings within themselves. Monastic spirituality says we must learn to listen to the cacophony within us in order to defy its demands and to dampen its hold on us.

  Monastic spirituality says it is the clamor of the self that needs to be brought to quiet so that the quiet of God can be brought to consciousness. Monastic spirituality says it is the cry of our own passions that mute the cry of others. Monastic spirituality says people who cannot live comfortably with silence can never live comfortably with noise.

  But silence is a frightening thing. Silence leaves us at the mercy of the noise within us. We hear the fears that need to be faced. We hear, then, the angers that need to be cooled. We hear the emptiness that needs to be filled. We hear the cries for humility and reconciliation and centeredness. We hear ambition and arrogance and attitudes of uncaring awash in the shallows of the soul. Silence demands answers. Silence invites us to depth. Silence heals what hoarding and running will not touch.

  So, monastic spirituality calls us to live quietly: to walk calmly rather than to run; to turn doorknobs rather than to push doors shut; to speak to a person directly rather than to shout down halls at them; to turn sound down rather than up; to avoid noise pollution; to give the gift of silence to others.

  Monastic spirituality calls us to learn to live easily with ourselves. Monastic spirituality calls us, too, to learn to step quietly and consciously into the presence of God, listening and waiting and trusting.

  Life without silent space is not life at all. If we’re accustomed to leave the TV on in empty rooms while we work to the blur of the sounds it siphons through the house or we can’t wash dishes without the radio playing; if we’re never alone for a minute of the day and we never just stand and watch a flower grow; if we can’t drive across town without the car tape recorder blaring and if sitting in a chair in silence for thirty minutes a day simply thinking, thinking, thinking is one of the more painful possibilities we can imagine, then silence may be exactly what we need to wash away the frenetic energy of life and still its storms.

  One thing is sure: without some semblance of silence everyday, there can be no such thing as monastic spirituality at all. “Monastics should diligently cultivate silence at all times,” the Rule wriles, “and especially at night” (RB 42:1). Especially at night we should bring the day to a centered close and listen inside to what it did to us and set about hearing its lessons and listening to its Word made flesh in us. Out of silence, the Rule implies, comes gentleness and patience and good work and seriousness of purpose and consciousness of the essence of life.

  Imagine what would happen in this country if children did not come from homes where families screamed at one another from morning dawn until the last hour of night. Imagine what the cities would be like if boom boxes did not blast and thump from every midnight to every dawn. Imagine what our souls would be like if the last thought we thought at night did not come to us from the local TV. Imagine what our lives and work and relationships would be like if they were not crowded with noise and simmering with agitation.

  Monastic silence is an antidote to the turmoil that is manufactured to distract us from the important things of life. Without silence, monastic spirituality cannot leaven the soul.

  But silence is not the only tool of the spiritual craft that is an auxiliary to Benedictine spirituality. Community customs are monastic practices designed to weld the community in the faith that unites them and to bring mindfulness even to the most mundane activities of life. When I was a young woman in the community, one of our customs was to break the bread on our dinner plates into three pieces at every meal in order to call to mind the three persons of the Trinity and to rest the dinner knives beside our serving plates on one of them in recollection of the cross. As we walked through the halls, we crossed our hands under our scapulars in tribute to Jesus bound. We bowed to the crucifix as we left the dining room. We called our bedrooms our “cells.” We took new names when we entered the novitiate to signify our change of life. We wore uniforms from a different century to indicate our commitment to this time-tried monastic way of life.

  Well, times have changed and new customs have sprung up to reflect them. It is our community custom now, for instance, to go from place to place in the monastery together every New Year, carrying incense and holy water, singing hymns and saying prayers, blessing the house. The custom itself is not original, of course, but the ritual which now surrounds it is. When I was a novice, it was the chaplain who went from door to door sprinkling holy water throughout our halls and saying the prayers while we went r
ight on with our daily work. Now the entire community, led by the prioress, processes from the infirmary, to the bedroom area, to the community room, to the dining room, to the chapel foyer to pray that this year our aging process, our private selves, our community gatherings, and our guests will all be filled with peace in this place.

  We do the same thing on Christmas Eve at the blessing of the Christmas crib to remind ourselves that Christmas is not really Christmas until the Christ is born again in each of our lives and in the community as a whole. At the end of every recitation of the Divine Office, the community prayer periods together, the prioress blesses the community itself to remind us of God’s everlasting presence with us and our obligation to be a chosen people.

  The lighting of the candles of the Advent wreath, the bowing at the “Glory be,” the daily remembrance in community prayer of both the sister next to die and the sisters who died on this day since the founding of the community in 1856, the conferences of the prioress, the gathering for community study days three times a year, the daily reading of the Rule and Constitutions, the annual community giveaway of accumulated clothing and materials to the poor, the distribution by the prioress of common readings for Lent, the creation of a common clothes rack where clothing donated to the sisters from local families is placed to be chosen at will by community members, are all community customs designed to make monastic values of community, simplicity, study, humility, poverty, and prayer explicit in our daily lives. Community customs are what make the family, family. They are things done together that tell us who we are together.