They tell us what we stand for and where we draw our energies from and why we go on from day to day. They tell us that over the years, though everything has changed, nothing has really changed at all, not our commitment, not our values, not our life with one another. They tell us that communities grow and change as we each grow and change but that there is a stainless steel underpinning of values and bonds and traditions and purposes that maintain us as we are. They tell us that, surrounded as we are by the trinkets of life, we must learn not to miss what is sacred about it.
People without customs are a rootless people and, often, a blind one. Customs help us to see the natural through the lenses of the Divine. If being at home for Thanksgiving Day is not vastly different from being somewhere else, why bother to go there at all? If there is no way to connect the normal with the wonderful, what can possibly give the little things in life spiritual meaning? The special song and special flower and special prayer and special good-night ritual are the things of which the sacra-mentality of life are made. It was my mother’s custom to sprinkle the house with holy water during heavy electric storms. It was my aunt’s custom to mark every family event with a collector’s plate. It is a local Polish custom to bless baskets of Easter food before the Easter Vigil. In every instance, the gesture is meant to help us see the connection between the human and the holy.
Community customs, revered and practiced and constantly evolving, are a basic element of a spirituality that sees life as good and earth as the beginning of heaven. It is not so much what is done that matters as that something is done to raise the ordinary parts of life to signs of life’s extraordinary blessings and graces. Benedictine spirituality is awash in customs that keep us moving steadily and surely from one year and one age to the next under the eye of God.
Another tool of the spiritual craft is the common table, a monastic practice of undying tenacity. It is one of the few things in the Rule for which permission to be absent is explicitly required (RB 43). It is one of the few things for which being late is considered an explicit offense (RB 43). The common table in monastic spirituality is no small thing. In Benedictine spirituality, eating is not an act of survival. Eating is an act of community.
The twentieth century understands banquets and fast-food chains, TV dinners and microwave ovens, but the twentieth century does not fully understand the family meal. When schedules get hectic, the family meal is the first thing to go. When plans are being made, being home for dinner is seldom a priority. When work and practice and shopping and meetings get extended, family meals are the first victims. When people live alone, no one gets invited in for dinner.
Benedictine spirituality sees the whole thing differently. The family meal, in the monastic mind-set, is that point of the monastic day when the love and service and self-sacrifice and Word of life that the Eucharist demonstrates in the chapel can be made real again in our personal lives. The act of gathering and sharing and celebrating the day together is the moment when we celebrate one another’s gifts to us. Everyone here has made this sustaining moment possible, by preparing the food or paying for the food or growing the food or carrying the food or setting the table for the food or serving the food or cleaning up after the family. Here, at the common table, all our care and work for one another is made tangible.
At the common table, too, is the source of the emotional nourishment and attention for which we all long. When the office is chaotic and the shop is suffocating and the house is unbearable and the organization is neurotic and our friends are disinterested and our acquaintances are unkind, there is always the family table where we will be wanted and attended to and healed of the bad memories of the day. At the common table, the gospel takes on new meaning. Here instructions are given and parables of life are told and miracles of love happen. Here the oldest to the youngest get heard. Here we learn to share: the last piece of pumpkin pie, the one bottle of wine, the recipe and conversation and time. Here are the people who make all the mechanical efforts of taking out the garbage regularly and cutting the grass and dusting the furniture and working overtime worthwhile. Here at the common table we see new life and old, the growing process and the aging process, our failures and our hopes. Here at the common table we remember that all the best work in the world is worth nothing unless it’s done for someone.
At the common table, too, we are taught self-control. There is only so much of the vegetables to go around. Everyone must get some. No one must take too much of anything. Nothing should be overcooked. Nothing should be wasted. Nothing that has been prepared for us should be rejected. Here, discipline and fasting are made real. Here we remember daily those who have none of what we have and recommit our lives to their fulfillment.
Indeed, if there is any indicator at all of the lack of spirituality in American culture it may well be the demise of the family meal and the common table, where privacy has superseded community and personal agendas have come to overshadow the common good. In the meantime, we eat in cars and on stools and in front of cheap TV shows, day after day after day and wonder why we’re lonely and why no one cares and why the gospel seems so remote. We open cans instead of peel the tomatoes or clean the corn it would take to make a meal; we eat on the run instead of at a table; we eat alone instead of with someone else and we wonder where the wonders of life have gone. Monastic spirituality says that the wonders of life are all around us and what we must do is to invite people in and learn to revere them.
In addition to silence, community customs, and the common table, the monastic practices of statio and lectio are also tools of the spiritual craft. Statio is a monastic-custom that was born centuries ago but clearly belongs in this one. Statio is the practice of stopping one thing before we begin another. It is the time between times. It is a cure for the revolving door mentality that is common in a culture that runs on wheels. In monastic spirituality it is common for the community to gather outside of chapel in silence before beginning prayer or at least to gather for a few minutes together in the chapel itself before intoning the opening hymn of the Office.
My novice mistress, in fact, insisted that we all be in chapel five minutes before the bell rang for prayer, an expectation the logic of which managed to elude me for years. After all, “an idle mind is the devil’s workshop,” the Puritan in me knew well. “Every minute counts,” I’d learned somewhere along the way. “Time is golden,” the samplers taught. Think of all the things that could have been done in that additional five minutes a day or thirty-five minutes a week or two hours and twenty minutes a month or twenty-eight hours a year: another chapter of typing, another batch of thank you notes composed, another wash ironed, another set of papers corrected. Work, valuable work, could have been done and I could still have made it on time for prayer.
It took years to realize that, indeed, I could have gotten all that work done and still had my body in chapel in time for prayer. It is highly unlikely, though, that my mind would have been there too. The practice of statio is meant to center us and make us conscious of what we’re about to do and make us present to the God who is present to us. Statio is the desire to do consciously what I might otherwise do mechanically. Statio is the virtue of presence.
If I am present to this child before I dress her, then the dressing becomes an act of creation. If I am present to my spouse in the living room, then marriage becomes an act of divine communion. If I am present to the flower before I cut it, then life becomes precious. If I am present to the time of prayer before I pray, then prayer becomes the juncture of the human with the Divine.
We have learned well in our time to go through life nonstop. Now it is time to learn to collect ourselves from time to time so that God can touch us in the most hectic of moments.
Statio is the monastic practice that sets out to get our attention before life goes by in one great blur and God becomes an idea out there somewhere rather than an ever present reality here.
Lectio, or sacred reading, is the monastic practice of keeping our eye
s on the transforming moments of life. It may be the centerpiece of all the spiritual arts of the Benedictine tradition and the most necessary for our time of all the pieces of the spiritual craft. The reflective reading of Scripture implies that Scripture was written as much for me as for the Chosen People or the early Christian community. Lectio is not so much an attempt to know God in history or Jesus in Israel as much as it is an attempt to know God in my life and Jesus in me.
Our society is full of books and films and videos all designed to show us something or teach us something or help us to escape somewhere. Sacred reading does not set out to teach; it sets out to enlighten. Sacred reading is intent on bringing us face to face with now, of letting us escape nothing in life, of enabling us to bring now to fullness. Like Paul, many of us have been more intent on the things of this world than on the spiritual life. Like Peter, many of us have betrayed the mind of Christ at company board meetings and family picnics. Like Mary, most of us have been asked to do something difficult, impossible, in our daily struggle to bring God’s Word to life.
The daily reading of Scripture, lectio, is the monastic practice designed to remind us always of who we are and what we have yet to grow into in this particular moment in life if we, too, are to be bearers of the Word. But listening and reading and sharing life with others is not enough. Benedictine spirituality calls us to do as well as to be.
Another tool of the spiritual craft is stewardship. This monastic practice says that what is good we must work to preserve. In my monastery some of the furniture is almost a hundred years old. “Your antiques are beautiful.” people say And we say, “What antiques?” The fact that things are old does not necessarily render them obsolete. Benedictine spirituality, on the contrary, simply does not believe in indiscriminate consumption. If a thing still works, we keep it and we use it gently so that it will work indefinitely. If it’s broken, we repair it, and if it’s usable, we develop it, and if it’s available, we share it. Stewardship, we believe, is what links the creature to the Creator in a genuine and life-giving way.
Finally, manual labor, too, is commitment to the stewardship of the earth to such a degree that we bear the responsibility for it in our own bodies. No work is beneath the monastic. No work is too small. No effort is too much for those who value the earth and take seriously the responsibility of caring for it.
More than that, manual labor, work with our hands, is work that makes everyone equal. The rich do not sweep faster or better than the poor; the educated do not wash clothes better than the illiterate; the professional does not shovel snow more easily than the farm laborer; the cleric does not change automobile oil with more delicacy than the mechanic. Manual labor is humility in practice.
Benedictine asceticism—fidelity to the commandments of God, the creation of human community, and a commitment to personal maturity—is manifested in a distinctive attitude of life that values silence and custom and statto and lectio and stewardship and manual labor and the common table. All of them speak of the holiness of life. All of them develop insight in us rather than learning. All of them plunge us into life rather than take us out of it. All of them require us to look and look again at things until we see them right. Abba Anthony is reported to have-said once, “Some have afflicted their bodies by asceticism, but they lack discernment, and so they are far from God.” The end of Benedictine asceticism is not spiritual legerdemain. The end of Benedictine asceticism is awareness and wisdom.
The function of Benedictine spirituality, you see, is simply the cultivation of monastic mindfulness.
14
Peace: Sign of the Disarmed Heart
If you desire true and eternal life, “keep your tongue free from vicious talk and your lips from all deceit; turn away from evil and do good; let peace be your quest and aim” (Ps. 33[34]:14-15).
RB PROLOGUE: 17
If you have a dispute with someone, make peace … before the sun goes down.
RB 4:73
There is an unfortunate myth about monastic life that has managed to color the spiritual life of both monastics and laity. The idea is that monastic life is free from stress, that there’s uninterrupted tranquillity here, that life in a monastery is one long walk with Jesus down a rose-strewn path. As if life in a monastery weren’t human. As if life in the monastery weren’t its own kind of struggle to grow. As if life in a monastery weren’t, as Benedict says in the Rule, the place where “we do battle” to bring the reign of God into our lives and into our worlds (RB Prologue). Over the portals of the great monasteries in Europe, the arch reads, “Pax” or peace, true. But what does it mean?
Though I had been waiting for the chance to join a religious community all my young life, it was not easy for me to enter the monastery. I remember the fear and the pain that came with leaving the familiar and the possible behind for the mysterious and the disciplined life of the community. I was, after all, a very young girl and this was a very great, foreboding endeavor, no matter how magnetic it was, no matter how meaningful it was. But then, if it was difficult to enter monastic life, it was often even more difficult to stay. When the great magnetic mystery turned to dailiness and the disciplines turned to frustration, when change shook the Church and community seemed to be disintegrating before our eyes, all the promises of fidelity were tested again and found shaky, sometimes very shaky indeed. Even now, at another stage of my life, the tension is often no less high. Is there nothing we have lived for that we can call achieved: not food for the hungry, not homes for the homeless, not advancement for the underclass, not justice for the people, not peace for the world? Where is the hundredfold, where is the satisfaction, where is the sense of spiritual achievement? What is this Benedictine peace anyway? Is it ever real? And if not here, where? And how?
The answer is plain to see, I have discovered, if you just look carefully at the basic sign of the community. Benedictine women in the United States wear a common ring that was first crafted and worn in the community of Nornberg, in Salzburg, Austria, in the year 1348. That ring has been worn by every generation since.
It’s a very simple ring and it’s very Benedictine. The ring itself tells us everything we need to know about Benedictine peace.
The ring design is stark and clear. The letters IHS, the Greek insignia for Jesus, are inscribed on the face of the ring. They are superimposed above three nail heads and are topped by the cross. Palm fronds circle the band of the ring. It is not what you would call an elegant design, but it is indeed a distinctive one. It is, in fact, the sign of what is really given with the legacy of Benedictine peace. The ring, you come to understand as the years go by, is the ring both of the cross and of the palm fronds, both of Good Friday and of Easter Sunday. The ring is the mark of consistent commitment, through good things and bad, through struggle and doubt, through suffering and hope with the sureness of heart that says that the struggle is worth it, that the struggle is blessed, that even the struggle itself is joy.
The message is obvious and after you wear the ring for the greater part of your life, finally the understanding begins to sink in. Real Benedictine peace comes from living the Paschal mystery well, from being willing to die to things that keep us from the fullness of life, from confronting culture with the memory of the cross, from letting nothing deter us from the will of God in life, from living immersed in Christ to such a degree that eventually nothing else matters and witness becomes an imperative.
Benedictine peace comes from being one with creation, from being in harmony with the universe, from rising above ourselves to the peace of Christ, which the world definitely does not give and which confounds the understanding of people who have been led to believe that peace is the absence of conflict or control by force. Benedictine peace comes from trying over and over again to find our place in the universe without violence, without selfishness, without demands.
Benedictine peace is not something that is ever achieved. It is something sincerely and consistently sought. It comes, in fact, from the seeking,
not from the getting. It comes from the inside, not the outside. It comes from right-heartedness, not from self-centeredness. It comes from the way we look at life, not from the way we control it. It comes from the attitudes we bring to things, not from the power we bring to them. The Desert Monastics tell a story that draws the distinctions well:
As the army occupied the village, many of the soldiers showed great cruelty in regard to the subjugated people. The most chosen objects of their atrocities were the monastics. So as foreign forces invaded the small towns and hamlets, the monastics fled to the mountains.
When the invaders arrived in one of the villages, however, the leader of the village reported to the commander, “All the monastics, hearing of your approach, fled to the mountains.”
And the commander smiled a broad, cold smile, for he was proud of having a reputation for being a very fearsome person.
But then the leader added, “All, that is, but one.”
The commander became enraged. He marched to the monastery and kicked in the gate. There in the courtyard stood the one remaining monastic. The commander glowered at the figure. “Do you not know who I am?” the commander demanded. “I am he who can run you through with a sword without batting an eyelash.”
And the monastic fixed the commander with a serene and patient look and said, “And do you not know who I am? I am one who can let you run me through with a sword without batting an eyelash.”
Monastic peace, in other words, is the power to face what is with the serenity of faith and the courage of hope, with the surety that good can come from evil and the certainty that good will triumph. Peace is the fruit of Benedictine spirituality. Peace is the sign of the disarmed heart .
Benedictine spirituality is a spirituality consciously designed to disarm the heart. Benedict wants monastics to be at peace with what has been given, at peace with what they are asked to do, at peace with those who guide them, at peace with one another, and at peace with themselves. “Let those who need more, ask, and let those who don’t, be grateful” (RB 34). “Let them honor the elder and love the younger” (RB 4). “If hard and difficult things are commanded let them, if the situation cannot be changed, do what must be done” (RB 68). “Let them not give way to anger or nurse grudges or even think of being deceitful or fail to be kind, or swear peace but think war in their hearts” (RB 4). Be soft with others and you will have peace in your own heart, the Rule implies. Be simple in your needs and you will have peace in your heart, the Rule directs. Be humble in what you demand of life and you will have peace in your heart, the Rule suggests. Be giving in what you take to life and you will have peace in your heart, the Rule counsels. Stop the wars within yourself and you will have peace, the Rule teaches. It is the ability to walk through life lightly—without rancor and greed and jealousy and selfishness—that leads, in other words, to Benedictine peace.
Wisdom Distilled from the Daily Page 16