In the second place, Benedict does not set out simply to reason with us about the disordered parts of our lives. Benedict intends to stop an action before it takes root in us. Physical punishment was common in a culture of the unlettered. Many monastic rules, in fact—the Penitential of St. Columbanus, the Rule of St. Fructuosus, the Rule of the Master—specify as many as a hundred lashes for offenses against the rules. At the same time, Benedict prefers another method more related to the nature of the sins. If we refuse to learn from the community and to cooperate with it, he implies, we have no right to its support and should be suspended from participation in it. Once we have separated ourselves from the community by withdrawing our hearts, then the community must withdraw from us in order to soften them.
There may be another point to be made, as well. Mild as it may have been according to the standards of the day, Benedict did mandate punishments and he did require atonement. The Rule would certainly expect the same attitudes from us even now. Things broken must be mended; things running away with us must be curbed; things awry in us must be set straight. What we may have to face in a culture in which self-control is too often seen as self-destructive is that none of that happens by accident. It requires discipline—conscious, honest, continuing discipline, not in the ways that discipline may have been prescribed in the sixth century, surely, but in some way that is honest and real.
CHAPTER 24
DEGREES OF EXCOMMUNICATION
March 1 – July 1 – Oct. 31
There ought to be due proportion between the seriousness of a fault and the measure of excommunication or discipline. The prioress or abbot determines the gravity of faults.
If monastics are found guilty of less serious faults, they will not be allowed to share the common table. Members excluded from the common table will conduct themselves as follows: in the oratory they will not lead a psalm or a refrain nor will they recite a reading until they have made satisfaction, and they will take meals alone, after the others have eaten. For instance, if the community eats at noon, they will eat in midafternoon; if the community eats in midafternoon, they will eat in the evening, until by proper satisfaction pardon is gained.
Chapter 24 makes two important points in the psychology of punishment and human association: first, the need to punish is no excuse for the arbitrary wielding of power and anger and vengeance; second, sins against community rupture the community and must be recognized as such.
Obedience is not a license to destroy another human being for the whims and fancies of an authority figure. To be a parent does not give anyone the right to beat a child. To be an official does not give anyone—the police, the president, the teacher—the right to vent either their force or their frustration on simple people for doing simple things. The nature of the punishment is always to be weighed against the nature of the offense.
The pursuit of holiness ought not to be a fearsome thing. Benedictine spirituality is a gentle manifestation of a loving and parenting God who wants us to be all that we can be.
What Benedict prescribes is one of two kinds of excommunication. In the first, for lighter offenses against the unity and peace of the community, a person is separated from the common table and denied the right to lead prayer. In the second, for more significant attacks on community well-being, the person is banished from community prayer, social life, and table sharing at the same time.
Benedict is teaching very clearly that to disturb the human community is serious. It makes us outcasts to our own kind. It eats away in the style of acid at the very things that a community needs to flourish and to be effective—love, trust, and cooperation. And, Benedict insinuates, once you have broken the bonds that make a community a community, a family a family, a team a team, there is no growth possible until we all face the fact.
CHAPTER 25
SERIOUS FAULTS
March 2 – July 2 – Nov. 1
Those guilty of a serious fault are to be excluded from both the table and the oratory. No one in the community should associate or converse with them at all. They will work alone at the tasks assigned to them, living continually in sorrow and penance, pondering that fearful judgment of the apostle: “Such a person is handed over for the destruction of the flesh that the spirit may be saved on the day of Jesus Christ” (1 Cor. 5:5). Let them take their food alone in an amount and at a time the prioress or abbot considers appropriate. They should not be blessed by anyone passing by, nor should the food that is given them be blessed.
“There is no failure except in no longer trying,” it is said. Benedict has no intention of letting anyone sink to the point where the intolerable is unnoticed and unremarked and institutionalized. Each of us is capable of betraying the best in us. We cut corners in the office, we stop cleaning the house, we let the study and the reading and the praying go. We sit around in life letting the juice turn black in us. We let the family down. We let the business slide. We let our minds and souls go to straw. We fight the call to growth and goodness with everything in us. We let the world carry us instead of carrying our part of the world. And, at that point, Benedict’s Rule calls for the group whose life we affect to say “Enough,” to quit bearing us up on the litter of community, to quit rewarding our selfish and surly behavior with security and affirmation and a patina of holiness. Excommunication, for all practical purposes, says, “You want to be a world unto yourself? Fine, be one.”
The problem, of course, is that a human being needs help to be a human being. At our worst we seek the solace of another’s hand. So, before expelling the rebellious, Benedict isolates them to give them time to decide if being out of the community is really what they want, really what they need, really what will bring them happiness. It is a time for making choices all over again.
It’s not a bad idea to distance ourselves from what we say we do not want in order to discover whether the problem is actually in it or, perhaps, in us. Sabbaticals and long vacations and discernment retreats, even going away to college when we’re young, all can help us see our parents and our family and our function in life in a completely different way. The point of the rule is simply that we have to take intervals to explore consciously what we ourselves are holding back from the group that depends on us.
CHAPTER 26
UNAUTHORIZED ASSOCIATION WITH THE EXCOMMUNICATED
March 3 – July 3 – Nov. 2
If anyone, acting without an order from the prioress or abbot, presumes to associate in any way with an excommunicated member, to converse with them or to send them a message, they should receive a like punishment of excommunication.
Contemporary psychology talks a great deal about the need to be a support to people under stress. Popular psychology has not often made a distinction between positive and negative support. It is not supportive to take away a person’s heart medicine simply because they do not like the taste of it. It is not supportive to fail to set a broken leg simply because the setting will be painful. It is not supportive to deny people the right and the environment to think a situation through, to recommit themselves, to gain perspective, to work things out without dividing the community over them. Sometimes pain itself cures. Benedict wants the cure to have the time to heal. Meddling, agitating, distracting a person from the great work of growth at such an important time in a person’s life is a grave fault itself.
CHAPTER 27
THE CONCERN OF THE ABBOT AND PRIORESS FOR THE EXCOMMUNICATED
March 4 – July 4 – Nov. 3
The abbot and prioress must exercise the utmost care and concern for the wayward because “it is not the healthy who need a physician, but the sick” (Matt. 9:12). Therefore they ought to use every skill of a wise physician and send in senpectae, that is, mature and wise members who, under the cloak of secrecy, may support the wavering sister or brother, urge them to be humble as a way of making satisfaction, and “console them lest they be overwhelmed by excessive sorrow” (2 Cor. 2:7). Rather, as the apostle also says: “Let love be reaffirmed” (2 Cor. 2:
8), and let all pray for the one who is excommunicated.
The place of punishment in the Rule of Benedict is never to crush the person who is corrected. The purpose of excommunication is to enable a person to get life in perspective and to start over again with a new heart. So, although not just anyone with any agenda—personal dissatisfaction, a misguided sense of what support implies, community division—is encouraged to talk to the person who is enduring excommunication, someone must. The abbot and prioress themselves are expected to see that the confused or angry or depressed persons get the help they need to begin fresh again from discerning and mature people who are skilled in the ways of both the mind and the soul, who know life and its rough spots, who realize that humility is what saves us from the blows of failure.
Excommunication is no longer a monastic practice but help from the wise through periods of resistance and reluctance must be a constant or the spiritual life may never come to fullness. Community—family—is that place everywhere where we can fail without fear of being abandoned and with the ongoing certainty that we go on being loved nevertheless. Perfection is not an expectation in monastic life any more than it is an expectation in any healthy environment where experience is the basis both of wisdom and of growth.
A contemporary collection of monastic tales includes the story of the visitor who asks of the monk, “What do you do in the monastery?” And the monastic replies, “Well, we fall and we get up and we fall and we get up and we fall and we get up.” Where continual falling and getting up is not honored, where the senpectae—the wise ones who have gone before us—are not present to help us through, life runs the terrible risk of drying up and blowing away before it is half lived.
It is the responsibility of the abbot or prioress to have great concern and to act with all speed, discernment, and diligence in order not to lose any of the sheep entrusted to them. They should realize that they have undertaken care of the sick, not tyranny over the healthy. Let them also fear the threat of the prophet in which God says: “What you saw to be fat you claimed for yourselves, and what was weak you cast aside” (Ezek. 34:3–4). They are to imitate the loving example of Christ, the Good Shepherd, who left the ninety-nine sheep in the mountains and went in search of the one sheep that had strayed. So great was Christ’s compassion for its weakness that “he mercifully placed it on his sacred shoulders” and so carried it back to the flock (Luke 15:5).
The idea that the spiritual life is only for the strong, for those who don’t need it anyway, is completely dispelled in the Rule of Benedict. Here spiritual athletes need not apply. Monasticism is for human beings only. The abbot and prioress are told quite clearly that they are to see themselves as physicians and shepherds tending the weak and carrying the lost, not as drill sergeants, not as impresarios. What we have in monasteries and parishes and all fine social movements and devoted rectories and most families are just people, simple people who never meet their own ideals and often, for want of confidence and the energy that continuing commitment takes, abandon them completely. Then, our role, the Rule of Benedict insists, is simply to try to soothe what hurts them, heal what weakens them, lift what burdens them and wait. The spiritual life is a process, not an event. It takes time and love and help and care. It takes our patient presence. Just like everything else.
CHAPTER 28
THOSE WHO REFUSE TO AMEND AFTER FREQUENT REPROOFS
March 5 – July 5 – Nov. 4
If anyone has been reproved frequently for any fault, or even been excommunicated, yet does not amend, let that member receive a sharper punishment: that is, let that monastic feel the strokes of the rod. But if even then they do not reform, or perhaps become proud and would actually defend their conduct, which God forbid, the prioress or abbot should follow the procedure of a wise physician. After applying compresses, the ointment of encouragement, the medicine of divine Scripture, and finally the cauterizing iron of excommunication and strokes of the rod, if they then perceive that their earnest efforts are unavailing, let them apply an even better remedy: they and all the members should pray for them so that God, who can do all things, may bring about the health of the sick one. Yet if even this procedure does not heal them, then finally, the prioress or abbot must use the knife and amputate. For the apostle says: “Banish the evil one from your midst” (1 Cor. 5:13); and again, “If the unbeliever departs, let that one depart” (1 Cor. 7:15), “lest one diseased sheep infect the whole flock.”
The Tao Te Ching reads, “If you realize that all things change, there is nothing you will try to hold on to. If you aren’t afraid of dying, there is nothing you can’t achieve.” Benedict’s call to growth is a pressing and intense one, even shocking to the modern mind. Physical punishment has long been suspect in contemporary society. Beating people with the rod is considered neither good pedagogy nor good parenting now, and the notion of whipping fullgrown adults is simply unthinkable. Times have changed; theories of behavior modification have changed; the very concept of adulthood has changed; this living of the Rule has changed. What has not changed, however, is the idea that human development demands that we grow through and grow beyond childish uncontrol to maturity and that we be willing to correct things in ourselves in order to do it, whatever the cost.
Benedict clearly believes that there are indeed things we must be willing to die to in life if we want to go beyond the fruitless patterns we’re in right now. We aren’t allowed to hang on to useless ideas or things or behaviors regardless of how good they might seem to us, regardless of their effect on others. We aren’t allowed to live without dying to self. The Rule insists that people be called to growth. The entire community is in the process together and the process is not to be ignored, however painful the process may be.
The spiritual life in the Benedictine tradition is not a series of overnight stays where we do what we want without care for the impact of it on the lives of others, no matter how right we think we are. Human community is the universal obligation to live fully ourselves and to live well with others. So important is personal growth in community life for Benedict that when people refuse to grow in community virtues, to be a blessing to others as well as to be open to the blessings that are there for themselves, Benedict asks them to leave.
There can come a point, it seems, after every effort has been made to deal with a problem and every attempt has been made to correct a spiritual disease in life, when enough is enough and ought not to be tolerated any longer. The person may be a very good person but, the implication is, this just may not be the place for that person. The shoe simply does not fit and the foot should not be wrenched to it.
The lesson is a universal one. There are a number of good things that it would not be good for us to do. People who become priests because their parents wanted a priest in the family are often unhappy priests. Children who stay on the farm when they should have gone to art school run the risk of twisting their lives into gnarled deadwood—and the farm with it. People with the courage to put us out of something may be the best spiritual guides we ever get.
CHAPTER 29
READMISSION OF MEMBERS WHO LEAVE THE MONASTERY
March 6 – July 6 – Nov. 5
If any community members, following their own evil ways, leave the monastery but then wish to return, they must first promise to make full amends for leaving. Let them be received back, but as a test of humility they should be given the last place. If they leave again, or even a third time, they should be readmitted under the same conditions. After this, however, they must understand that they will be denied all prospect of return.
Life is often a series of false starts while we find out who we are and determine where we really want to go. Benedict understands the struggle of uncertainty and indecision and makes room for it. After all, the giving of oneself to anything is no small thing and should be done with reflection and with peace of mind. So, Benedict allows candidates to the life to try again and again. What he does not permit them to do, however, is to ignore the fac
t that behavior has consequences or that sometime, somehow, they must finally commit to something if they are going to get on with the process of both psychological and spiritual growth. With those two concepts in mind, Benedict allows candidates to enter and leave the monastery no more than three times and then only provides that they realize that every new beginning begins at the beginning again.
There are in this chapter good insights for all of us: eventually we must all settle down and do something serious with our lives and every day we must make a fresh beginning of it.
CHAPTER 30
THE MANNER OF REPROVING THE YOUNG
March 7 – July 7 – Nov. 6
Every age and level of understanding should receive appropriate treatment. Therefore, as often as the young, or those who cannot understand the seriousness of the penalty of excommunication, are guilty of misdeeds, they should be subjected to severe fasts or checked with sharp strokes so that they may be healed.
In the early centuries of monasticism, it was not uncommon for people to dedicate their children to religious life at a very early age or, much in the style of later boarding schools, to send them to an abbey for education where they lived very like the monastics themselves. The monastery, then, was a family made up of multiple generations. Benedict made provisions for every member of the community. Life in the Benedictine tradition was not a barracks or a prison or an exercise in deindividuation. On the contrary.
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