Appropriating the Monastic Tradition
My topic is “Appropriating the Monastic Tradition.” I refer here to the selective adoption of this monastic legacy by non-monastics for the immense help it can provide in living the fundamental Christian vocation. So I wish to begin this rather daunting task first by discussing briefly how the spirituality of all Christians is defined by the paschal mystery of Christ’s death and resurrection through baptism. I will then turn to the specific theme of my talk and this conference, using by way of illustration my own sojourn in the field of monastic literature. In other words, I will be shamelessly autobiographical. Finally, I want to consider a few aspects of the Rule of St. Benedict, surely the most influential of monastic rules for the Western Church, to consider those aspects of the Rule I take to be particularly instructive for non-monastics like myself as we seek fidelity to our Christian vocation.
What, then, of baptism’s relation to our immersion in the paschal mystery? At the Great Vigil of Easter, the preeminent occasion for Holy Baptism and the annual renewal of baptism by the faithful, the appointed epistle is drawn from St. Paul’s letter to the Romans, chapter 6. It contains the most extensive and profound teaching on the significance of baptism in the New Testament. Here Paul contends that baptism forges nothing less than union with Christ in his death and resurrection: “Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? Therefore we have been buried with him by baptism into death… so we too might walk in newness of life. For if we have been united with him in a death like his, we will certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his” (Rom. 6:3-5). (1) With baptism the goal of the mystics—union with God through Christ—is already given to us, at least germinally. This is no vague, amorphous union with the divine. Rather, as Paul delineates it, it is a union and new identity we take on precisely as participation in the paschal mystery: the death and resurrection of Christ.
One of the odd, we might say paradoxical, features of Christian living is the experience of these two sides of the paschal mystery simultaneously. For example, Paul himself narrates in 2 Corinthians how “We are afflicted in every way, but not crushed; perplexed, but not driven to despair; persecuted but not forsaken; struck down but not destroyed; always carrying in the body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be visible in our bodies” (4: 8-10). This “life of Jesus” (which can be none other than the resurrected life of Jesus) manifests itself as an abiding hope in the midst of our trials. Affliction, perplexity, persecution, and other setbacks are felt as the sufferings they indeed are, yet they are never experienced as ultimate. Affliction, therefore, does not crush nor does perplexity give way to despair. The risen life of Jesus irradiates present suffering, streaming to us from the glory yet to be revealed. Paul can therefore testify that we are “always carrying in our body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be visible in our bodies.” Hope in the resurrection, as both future promise and abiding presence, shapes Christian life to conformity with Jesus who, in the words of the Epistle to the Hebrews, “for the sake of the joy that was set before him endured the cross, disregarding its shame (12: 2b).
Yet to return to Paul’s exposition of baptism in Romans 6, the Apostle here seems to have something very specific in mind as he delineates what it means to share in the death of Christ. In the context of baptismal conversion, it spells a “death to sin.” And so in this same passage, he goes on to say: “We know that our old self was crucified with him so that the body of sin might be destroyed, and we might no longer be enslaved to sin. For whoever has died is freed from sin. . . . So you also must consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus” (Rom. 6: 5-6, 11). Baptism, then, and the Christian life that issues from it, has a sharp ascetical edge. It demands a continuing “death to sin,” enacted liturgically in the baptismal renunciations and by immersion in the baptismal waters—our burial with Christ; and by a painful and laborious “death to sin” every day of our lives, with many humiliating lapses along the way.
For conversion is no simple or easy matter, and it certainly does not happen at a stroke—not even in cases of dramatic “conversion experiences” such as Paul himself underwent on the road to Damascus. There are layers and layers to sin, some embedded deep in our subconscious, others part of our familial and social conditioning, and still others the result of ingrained habits accumulated over years. It takes time, often decades, even to discover what many of these are and finally to be liberated from these forms of enslavement, which are often quite subtle. We do so under the leading of that Spirit of Truth who convicts of us sin. Baptism thus set us on the path of purgation, even as it initiates the grace of illumination and union: the ancient threefold path of Christian spirituality.
Where can we find help in this endeavor? One great reservoir of assistance can be found in the ascetical and mystical tradition of the Church, a wisdom honed by centuries of prayer, reflection, and practice. Most of the writings that form this tradition were produced by monastics, those leading an eremitical or coenobitical life, or by celibate religious. One might conclude from this circumstance that there is something about non-monastic life that is somehow inimical to the development of spiritual depth, holiness, or wisdom, but that would be a mistake. God calls every member of the Church to what Ephesians describes as “the measure of the full stature of Christ” (4:13b), and God supplies the grace for it. But from the early centuries of Christian history, the monastic vocation has lent itself to the development of what we might more generally call spiritual writing and spiritual theology for at least two reasons. First, we find built into the monastic calling an overpowering need for solitude and silence as the environment most conducive to prayer. Some measure of these conditions is, I believe, essential for every Christian life to flourish, but monastics almost by definition must have it. Christians fled to the desert and later to the monasteries to seek that purity of heart by which we may see God—see God, love God, enjoy God, and participate in the divine life. Only in solitude and silence can we confront self, including our own demonic preoccupations, passions, and attachments; and often it is only in such stillness that we can apprehend God. These conditions monastics had in abundance, and whenever they are edged out for one reason or another, the monastic vocation is compromised.
In the second place, besides solitude and silence, monastics also had access to literary culture—a rare privilege in antiquity right up to the early modern period. Even though most of the desert ascetics were unlettered peasants, they are not the ones we hear from directly. Others, thankfully, wrote down their sayings and their stories. Some measure of literacy, however, is implied in the Rule of Benedict: witness, for example, the provision of a book for each monk during Lent. It was not until relatively recent times, say, the last hundred years or so, that monastic and mystical literature has gradually become available in translation and in print. And so nowadays, as more non-monastic Christians have access to the leisure requisite for the contemplative life and of course to literacy, they too are making notable contributions to spiritual theology. Think of Evelyn Underhill in the early twentieth century, for example, or Belden Lane, A.M. Allchin, Esther de Waal, Mark McIntosh, and Kathleen Norris in our own time.
Yet all these writers have inevitably drawn on the monastic tradition for inspiration, even as they offer their own contributions. We are now faced with the opposite problem of those who lived a couple of generations back: that is, the monastic literature is so vast one can scarcely know where to begin to plunge in. Sometimes we fall in by accident. When I was twelve years old, I happened upon Thomas Merton’s The Seven Storey Mountain, which was among my parents’ collection of books. It fascinated me. Of course, I didn’t understand half of it, but the half I did understand spoke to me of a passion for God such as I had never encountered before. By the time I was in high school, I was reading and pondering his Seeds of Contemplation (also in my parents’ library, God bless them!), and this time I did get it. Merton became for me, as he did for many in the twentieth century, a mentor in the life of the Spirit, as he transmitted monastic insight distilled through his own Cistercian experience.
Although I have studied monastic literature academically, my initial impulse for reading any particular author has almost always been personal. This is not a motivation one usually flaunts in the academy, but it seems safe to confess it here! These writers are just plain helpful. So, for instance, when I was in graduate school working on a doctorate in medieval studies, the time came to find a dissertation topic. After I had spent awhile floundering about, my husband suggested: “Why don’t you work on the fourteenth-century English mystics since you’re already reading Julian and The Cloud?”—authors not covered in any of my coursework, but to whom I had turned, as usual, for guidance. I took his advice, and writing my thesis on these two writers as well as Walter Hilton turned out to be the most satisfying endeavor of my graduate school career. Interestingly, each of them represents a different aspect of the rich spectrum of monastic vocation: Julian of Norwich, a solitary anchoress; the anonymous author of The Cloud of Unknowing and other mystical works, quite possibly a Carthusian; and Walter Hilton, an Augustinian canon.
For me, Julian served primarily as a theologian—one who recognized that theological quandaries could trigger pastoral problems and vice-versa. Her audience consists, she says, of “Christ’s lovers,” and what the devout suffer from above all is—you guessed it, acedia. Our despondency arises from our dogged persistence in sin and the perception that we are making no progress at all. For Julian, this debilitating state of dejection opens up larger speculative questions about divine providence, the origins of evil, and God’s sufferance of human freedom. She struggles with these issues in the course of her sixteen visions and engages them tenaciously in prayer. In the end, astute pastor that she is, Julian never denies the reality of the mess that we are in nor the suffering that sin inflicts upon us. What we see in ourselves has some validity. But there is a higher truth; the other side, we might say, of the paschal mystery. She comes to see that even now we occupy another plane of existence: our identity in Christ and our final glory in him. We need, therefore, to view ourselves with this double vision, each corresponding to a different level of truth. She offers to the despondent soul words of encouragement and a theological ground for hope, even joy. All this is but one aspect of her extraordinary visions, illuminated by more than twenty years of meditation upon them.
Since I first worked on the Cloud-author in the mid-1970s, the apophatic way of prayer that he teaches has come into general prominence in a somewhat modified form through the Centering Prayer movement, first promoted, as many of you know, by two Cistercians, Thomas Keating and Basil Pennington. If Thomas Merton was the most widely read monastic writer in the mid-twentieth century, the Centering Prayer movement (whether or not people have read the works of Fathers Keating and Pennington) has probably been the paramount vehicle for appropriating this aspect of the monastic tradition for the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. It has introduced many people to prayer without words; and in their “sits,” they sometimes sense the ineffable and transcendent divine Presence. Even when nothing seems to have “happened” and practitioners have spent most of their time trying to release the flotsam and jetsam of intruding thoughts, most people report a greater calmness, a sense of inner healing, liberation from old resentments and self-destructive “tapes” as well as an enhanced intimacy with God as the various fruits of this practice. Thus it can issue in a “death to sin” at levels of our personality beyond our reach.
Walter Hilton, the least known today among this trio of English mystics (although he was widely read up through the seventeenth century) also became for me a reliable guide. His Scale of Perfection has sometimes been dubbed a “summa” of the spiritual life, and indeed he charts an interior course that consists not so much of a rigid step-by-step formula for spiritual ascent as a broad, yet detailed, description of our entire movement towards God. He leads the reader from the earliest movements of repentance, through an analysis of sin and the remedies of virtue, to the warmth of affective prayer, and finally contemplative vision and love. Like other monastic writers, he is a shrewd psychologist of the soul, describing accurately to readers their own subjective states and the sometimes-false interpretations we can conclude from this data when left on our own. He teaches and exhorts, knowing just when to offer comfort and when to urge his reader to strenuous effort.
In my final year of seminary, I was allowed to do my field education in spiritual direction. It was the Episcopal monastic community of St. John the Evangelist in Cambridge, Massachusetts, who took me under their wing in what was something of an experiment for them, the seminary, and me. The monk who served as my mentor, besides coaching me in my fledgling ministry, required some reading to go along with it. Indeed, he arranged for a weekly seminar to meet at the monastery consisting of area theologians and pastors who worked in the field of spiritual theology. Yet the reading he selected was not, interestingly enough, that of contemporary writers on spiritual direction. Rather, he wanted me to deepen and expand the work I had done in graduate school by delving into Evagrius and the early Cistercians.
Ah Evagrius! Who could even imagine the Christian ascetical tradition without his groundbreaking insight into the “Eight Evil Thoughts” which, thanks to John Cassian, passed into the Western Church, which then appropriated them as the “Seven Deadly Sins”? “Thoughts,” however, is really more to the point than “sins” (an unfortunate translation) because the word “sin” usually conjures up for us specific sinful acts. But for Evagrius, as for Jesus in his exposition of the Law in the Sermon on the Mount, “it’s the thought that matters.” Evil deeds there are to be sure, but they start inside our heads and unclean hearts. Professor Fagerberg has already drawn our attention to Evagrius and his treatment of acedia. I would like to quote more from this passage in which he describes the hapless monk subject to this demon. Evagrius dramatizes the distracted fretting—indeed, the welcoming of distraction—that characterizes this state. It makes us susceptible to looking for comfort in the wrong places—in the monk’s case, as often in our own, in the next meal or in a change of locale. Acedia makes us grouchy and out-of-sorts with everybody and everything. We fall prey to specious theological reasoning, masquerading as sophistication. We become victims of melancholic nostalgia and fruitless yearning for the past. Evagrius obviously knew the demon of acedia from personal acquaintance, and his portrayal of it is marked by a compassionate yet decidedly tongue-in-cheek satire. It’s as if he wants not only for us to recognize the symptoms of this disease, but also to laugh us out of it. What could be a better remedy for doleful acedia?
The demon of acedia—also called the noonday demon—is the one that causes the most serious trouble of all. . . . First of all, he makes it seem that the sun barely moves, if at all, and that the day is fifty hours long. Then he constrains the monk to look constantly out the windows, to walk outside the cell, to gaze carefully at the sun to determine how far it stands from the ninth hour [the time of breaking the fast for dinner], to look now this way and now that to see if perhaps. . . . Then too he instills in the heart of the monk a hatred for the place, a hatred for his very life itself, a hatred for manual labor. He leads him to reflect that charity has departed from among the brethren, that there is no one to give encouragement. Should there be someone at this period who happens to offend him in some way or other, this too the demon uses to contribute further to his hatred. This demon drives him along to desire other sites where he can more easily procure life’s necessities, more readily find work and make a real success of himself. He goes on to suggest that, after all, it is not the place that is the basis of pleasing the Lord. God is to be adored everywhere. He joins to these reflections the memory of his dear ones and of his former way of life. He depicts life stretching out for a long period of time, and brings to the mind’s eye the toil of the ascetic struggle and, as the saying has it, leaves no leaf unturned to induce the monk to forsake his cell and drop out of the fight. (Praktikos 12) (2)
Evagrius concludes this trenchant description of acedia on a hopeful note. He observes that the one who presses through this trial is delivered, at least for the time being, from other demonic attacks and enjoys instead “a deep peace and inexpressible joy.”
Before leaving Evagrius, I’d like to touch upon his treatment of anger—he means, of course, excessive anger—because it poses a nearly universal problem. If acedia “causes the most serious trouble of all,” anger, Evagrius holds, is “the most fierce passion.” Ain’t it the truth? While in the Sermon on the Mount Jesus observes that murder has its roots in violent anger, Evagrius, given his audience, reflects instead on how it undermines prayer. “It constantly irritates the soul,” he writes, “and above all at the time of prayer it seizes the mind and flashes the picture of the offensive person before one’s eyes” (Praktikos 11). Who hasn’t suffered this double disorder of growing resentment at the very time of prayer—a miserable state of finding our devotional efforts utterly sabotaged, perhaps inciting yet more antipathy against the malefactor because of it? Yet anger is not a passion entirely to be eschewed. “Anger,” Evagrius teaches, “is given to us so that we might fight against the demons” (Praktikos 24). There is a holy anger whose energy can be harnessed in the struggle against sin in its manifold forms, both personal and social. Small wonder that my mentor in spiritual direction wished me to study Evagrius. Those engaged in the cure of souls need to understand the diseases and disorders of the soul as well as their remedies. How else can we “die to sin” and be “alive to God in Jesus Christ,” as Paul exhorts the baptized, if we don’t have mentors in the present and across the centuries to show us how?
My relation to the Society of St. John the Evangelist began in 1978 and continues to this day since I am an associate of that community, and it is to one of their houses that I turn for annual retreat. In the thirty years that I lived in Connecticut I was regularly at the monastery either to receive spiritual direction from one of the monks, share with them in the ministry of leading retreats and, in my early years after ordination, participate at their invitation in a peer group of spiritual directors, composed of both monks and non-monastics engaged in this ministry. This monastic community was, and is, the epitome of a warm but unobtrusive hospitality. Naturally over the decades, I got to observe them at rather close range. I admired their life and worship, their prayerfulness and evident love for the brethren. I wondered what aspects of their way of life I could incorporate into my own and even into the parishes I was serving. It is to this question that I now turn, concluding my observations by drawing also on the Rule of St. Benedict.
What struck me most about the monks was that they lived an ordered life. I relished the silence that reigns in the house from after Compline in the evening until after breakfast in the morning, when the brothers meet for Chapter. After Morning Prayer, an hour is set aside for personal prayer and meditation. At the conclusion of that period we gather again in the chapel for the Holy Eucharist. Participating in a Eucharist for which we have prepared by the Office and meditation, all enveloped in silence, gives the celebration palpable depth. Words that come out of silence are freshly heard with new sharpness, and those present are better able to absorb them. The pacing of the liturgy at SSJE further supports this process of attentive listening to the Word of God and the words of the liturgy. Brief periods of silence follow the readings and punctuate key transitions. Gestures, without being ponderous, are given their full symbolic weight. After the liturgy, no one is catapulted into sociability. One can linger in the chapel for a while before preparing a simple breakfast for oneself from the available buffet. This, too, is done in silence. Only afterwards does work begin, but throughout the day both monks and guests strive to maintain a quiet atmosphere in the house.
How much of this could I apply to myself, whose situation as a parish priest, wife, and mother was anything but monastic? Actually, quite a lot. I’ll begin with the parish. I believe most people come to church hoping to experience God. Yet in many places we rush through the liturgy and surround it with so many activities that people who are already exhausted from work find church yet one more place where they have to be “on.” What true prayer requires, though, is a receptivity of spirit. The Sunday Eucharist is where most people learn prayer and, as Evelyn Underhill sagely observed, “the spirit of prayer is more easily caught than taught.” So silence. Some people really do want to be able to enter the church before the liturgy to pray and collect their thoughts, but a culture of pre-service chitchat makes that impossible. So I found that a simple notice in the bulletin about how we observe silence upon entering the church sufficed for regulars and visitors, coupled with discussion with parishioners about why we might observe this practice. The parish hall was always there for those who wanted to catch up with their neighbors over a cup of coffee before or after the Eucharist. During the liturgy itself, we maintained short intervals of silence after the readings and the sermon as well as a slightly longer one after the reception of Holy Communion. The pacing was measured. These silent pauses added in total no more than four minutes to the celebration. Bits of silence helped people stop being afraid of it and instead sink into it. It laid the groundwork for other explorations with silence in personal prayer, quiet days, and retreats. Silence at points in the liturgy became an acquired taste in the parish, so much so that when circumstances took them elsewhere, parishioners reported feeling rushed and jerked around. My personal “take away” from the monastery in this regard lay in the importance of liturgical preparation, both exterior and interior, before any Eucharistic celebration.
The twelve hours of silence the monks enjoy each night and early morning does not happen by accident. The monastic rule they follow has wisely organized their daily schedule to support their goals: ever-deepening union with God through prayer, both liturgical and personal; faithfulness to the vowed life, which includes love for one another; and their various pastoral ministries. In other words, they have figured out how to get where they want to be, and the Rule protects them from competing claims.
Since the publication in the mid-twentieth century of Martin Thornton’s classic work, Christian Proficiency, contemporary Anglicans have been familiar with the notion of a Rule of Life, which Thornton strongly advocated. He was one of the first of several recent writers to perceive the strongly Benedictine flavor of Anglican spirituality. Esther de Waal made much the same point in her beautiful 1984 book, Seeking God: The Way of St. Benedict. Living in the deanery of Canterbury Cathedral at the time of writing, she noted how half the cathedrals in England were once Benedictine abbeys. This history shaped the Book of Common Prayer, among other things, as Thomas Cranmer compressed the monastic offices that mark the beginning and end of the day to become Morning and Evening Prayer. His aim was to restore the office to the parish church for daily recitation, making it available in English to both clergy and laity.
Thornton discerned what he called a “Threefold Rule of Prayer” as a distinctive, though not unique, feature of Anglican spirituality. The three interrelated parts consist of Eucharist, Daily Office, and personal prayer. Thornton was a pastoral theologian who judiciously left the devising of a Rule of Life up to the individual, taking into account that person’s particular circumstances, while urging conversation with a pastor or spiritual guide. At the same time, Thornton considered that for Christians in the catholic tradition, the Rule of Prayer would have to contain some basic elements. Primacy had to be given to the Holy Eucharist on Sundays as the Lord’s Day, the day of resurrection, as well as its celebration on major feast days of the Church. Some form of the Office, which the Book of Common Prayer calls “daily,” would enable praying with the Church, the sanctification of time, and a more engaged participation in the liturgical year. Finally, commitment to regular personal prayer, which might include lectio divina or some other form of meditation, would foster intimacy with the Lord and balance the corporate prayer of the liturgy.
Such a Rule of Prayer within a more comprehensive Rule of Life creates space for the things that matter. Like the monastic rules, it safeguards practices in tune with our deepest desires—goals usually at odds with our driven, consumerist culture. It helps us be less reactive and haphazard in our endeavors. We can use our time—which is nothing less than our lives—deliberately. It does not crush spontaneity but provides focus. A flexible instrument, a well-crafted, modest Rule of Life seeks to protect that which is essential, yet fragile. It helps restore that harmony and balance so elusive in today’s world but which is a justly celebrated characteristic of the Rule of Benedict. Just how useful a Rule of Life would prove in organizing one’s schedule in accord with one’s considered values and goals is something I learned from observing the monks.
Yet a Rule of Life and the various monastic rules have a still older parentage. On the Day of Pentecost after the numerous baptisms that followed upon Peter’s preaching, Luke tells us that these new Christians “devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, the breaking of bread, and the prayers” (Acts 2:42). Baptism implies a distinctive way of life within the community of faith. Significantly, this verse from Acts is now incorporated in the 1979 Book of Common Prayer as part of the Baptismal Covenant. The candidate for Holy Baptism is asked: “Will you continue in the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, in the breaking of bread, and in the prayers?” (BCP, 304). A corporate Rule of Life thus shapes the practice, at least ideally, of all the baptized. I say “ideally” because pre-baptismal catechesis does not always explain the terms of this promise. But by this affirmation the new Christian embraces the faith of the Church and her community (the apostles’ teaching and fellowship), corporate Eucharistic worship (the breaking of bread), and “the prayers.” For devout Jews—the congregation presupposed in Acts—“the prayers” would have meant not only personal devotion but also the daily round of synagogue worship that took place in the morning, mid-afternoon, and evening. In other words, it entailed the systematic reading from Scripture, psalmody, and prayer that eventually evolved into the Daily Office.
Esther de Waal, Joan Chittister, and others have begun unearthing the treasures in the Rule of Benedict to see what it might have to teach contemporary non-monastic Christians. Speaking of the Rule, de Waal notes how “It has in the past fifteen hundred years been the way countless Christians living under the vows in a monastic community have found God, but it speaks as well to all those of us struggling to follow our baptismal promises in the world.” (3) To begin with what is obvious, the Rule is written for the entire monastic community. Benedict has quite a lot to say about relations among the brethren: how the abbot, for instance, must seek counsel from the community before making important decisions, and not assume that all wisdom resides in himself. Or how he counsels the abbot, after disciplining a wayward member of the community, to back off and let others whom he appoints offer the needed solace and advice. Then consider the mutual deference and affection he directs the brothers to practice. “Let them strive to be the first to honor one another,” he writes, citing Paul (Rom. 12:10). He then goes on to say:
They should bear each other’s weaknesses of both body and character with the utmost patience. They must compete with one another in obedience. No one should pursue what he judges advantageous to himself, but rather what benefits others. They must show selfless love to the brothers. Let them fear God out of love. They should love their abbot with sincere and humble charity. Let them prefer absolutely nothing to Christ, and may he lead us all together to everlasting life. (RB 72: 5-12) (4)
All of us live in community; even solitaries live within the fellowship of the Church and the communion of saints. But most of us live in smaller communities as well, microcosms of the Church catholic: the family, our colleagues, and our parish, for instance. While we may extol the comfort and support we find in such circles, community life in any form requires considerable patience and mutual forbearance. It has long been noted that the Rule of Benedict substituted the occasionally extravagant feats of desert asceticism with the unheroic challenge of living in community. Unheroic: but for that reason doable for the rest of us. Unheroic, but still pretty hard to embody the mutual love that Benedict demands of his monks and that Paul commends in 1 Corinthians 13. It does, in fact, require a daily dying to self. But as Benedict reminds us at the conclusion of this chapter just cited, in so doing Christ “may lead us all together to everlasting life.” Notice how Benedict envisions salvation and blessedness as a gift we receive together.
Community life requires stability. I remember a sister at the reformed Protestant community of Grandchamps in Switzerland once remarking that a crucial moment arrives when a sister stops asking herself, “What can this community give to me?” and instead asks herself, “What do I have to give to this community?” For community to flourish, we need to know that people will be there for us, holding fast to a commitment that transcends personalities and preferences. This applies, obviously, to monastic life and to marriage; but there are also others who have a claim on our allegiance—elderly parents, for example, and even friends and colleagues. Perhaps nothing seems more elusive to our mobile society than geographical stability; and maybe for that reason, it is especially needful. Few professional people today live in the same town or city where they grew up. We are free to move about, looking for the best job or the most congenial part of the country in which to live. But this freedom has come at the price of families scattered across states; friendships made and, if not broken, weakened by lack of contact; an inability to become involved in civic and social institutions that need our support because, hey, we just may not be here next year. We are rootless. Most of us cannot pledge ourselves to a place with the kind of stability that the Benedictine monk must vow, or the way Kentucky farmer and writer Wendell Berry has tended his plot of ancestral earth year after year. Yet a measure of stability or rootedness may be within our reach if we decide at some point simply to hunker down for the long haul, burrowing into the graces hidden in the limitations that define any place or community. “Go, sit in your cell, and your cell will teach you everything,” the desert ascetics taught.
Stability requires that I work out my salvation within the particular circumstances in which I find myself without running away or distracting myself like the monk plagued by acedia. And today, with opportunity for distraction surrounding us on every side, we need a clear-headed recognition that God is present and waiting to be discovered in the ordinary conditions of life, no matter how mundane. Or as Metropolitan Anthony Bloom has written of his own monastic formation: “We discovered that at the heart of stability there is the certitude that God is everywhere, that we have no need to seek God elsewhere, that if I cannot find God here I shan’t find Him anywhere, because the Kingdom of God begins within us.” (5)
Non-monastic Christians are finding innumerable points of insight through study of Benedict’s Rule. A hospitality that receives each guest as Christ applies to every Christian household, which should be an oasis of welcome to strangers as well as friends. Benedict insists upon the utmost reverence not just for people but also for things. After giving detailed instructions to the cellarer for the distribution of goods, Benedict writes: “He should consider the pots of the monastery and all its goods as if they were the holy bowls of the altar” (RB 31:10). What a word of judgment upon our throwaway consumerism that has helped spawn the present ecological crisis. And what a vision of sacramental regard for everything around us. The Rule of Benedict also endows the most menial task with dignity, insofar as it is done for the love of Christ; and manual labor, performed in late antiquity only by slaves and peasants, is shared by monks whatever their previous status in the world. All work, not just that which pays well or garners prestige, is valuable in God’s eyes; and those who labor at humble and often wearisome jobs deserve no less respect for their contribution to the commonweal.
I would like to conclude now with some thoughts about the promise of conversatio morum that the monk makes upon his profession, because it can particularly illumine the continuing spiritual task of all the baptized. Much ink has been spilled about this nearly untranslatable phrase, conversatio morum, but I think those are right who render it something like “fidelity to the monastic lifestyle.” (6) Benedict could have written “conversio” rather than “conversatio,” and some subsequent scribes no doubt thought that’s what he must have meant and changed his word to “conversio.” But “conversatio” was deliberate. It has overtones of a more dynamic, ongoing process than “conversion” tends to connote, even in English. At his profession, the monk is promising to bend every effort to become truly a monk. He therefore accepts the round of monastic life that will unquestionably shape him. The overriding dedication to worship, the opus dei; the humdrum tasks assigned to him faithfully performed; the affection and the friction of other brothers; obedience to the abbot; all these things and the other precepts in the Rule; and all the challenges that no one can envision beforehand who makes promises for life (whether at baptism, in marriage, or in the monastery)—all these will change him over time, allowing conversatio morum to do its work. Perseverance is a cardinal virtue here, together with love, as Benedict declares at the end of his Prologue:
. . . the path of salvation . . . can only be narrow at its outset. But as we progress in the monastic life and in faith, our hearts will swell with the unspeakable sweetness of love, enabling us to race along the way of God’s commandments. Then we will never depart from his teaching and we will persevere in his doctrine until death. Likewise, we will participate in the passion of Christ through patience so as to deserve to be companions in his kingdom. (48-50)
Benedict thus concludes his Prologue with reference to the monks’ participation in the passion of Christ and anticipation of the kingdom of God, together as always, but now as companions of Christ as well as one another. This is nothing less than the paschal mystery of Christ’s death and resurrection, here internalized in monastic life, just as it remains paradigmatic of all Christian life. And like the monks, Christians, too, whether born at the font as babies or as adults, only grow into their own conversatio morum—fidelity to the Christian lifestyle—over a lifetime. The path is not so very different from the monk’s, but the monastic heritage such as we encounter in the Rule of St. Benedict can bring it into sharper relief. It entails obedience to God, who speaks to us in myriad ways—through Scripture, in worship, through the community of faith, in the depths of our hearts, in creation, and in those around us—if we have ears to hear. It means loving those who form our communities, with patience and forbearance, embracing this unheroic asceticism because we need it. It involves accepting the limitations and stresses of our God-given situation without fuss and complaining. (Benedict has some strong words about “murmuring.”) It approaches everything, material things as well as people, plants and animals, the very earth, with reverence as a gift of God and a sacramental means to him. Above all, amid these ordinary conditions, it requires giving ourselves over to the death of Christ in which we were baptized, thus drawing near to the frontier of his resurrection. In writing to his beloved Philippians, Paul articulates this overarching desire amid the ongoing mystery of Christ in us:
I want to know Christ, and the power of his resurrection and the sharing of his sufferings by becoming like him in his death, if somehow I may attain the resurrection from the dead. Not that I have already obtained this or have already reached the goal; but I press on to make it my own, because Christ Jesus has made me his own. Beloved, I do not consider that I have made it my own; but this one thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on to the goal for the prize of the heavenly call of God in Christ Jesus. (3:10-14)
Paul here presents a vibrant account of the paschal mystery at work in us. Christ has made us his own, pulling us forward through the energetic embrace of this gift. It is hard to imagine that Benedict did not entertain similar sentiments as he exhorts his monks to persevere, running the course imbued with “the unspeakable sweetness of love.” His Rule, one item in the vast treasury of monastic writing, can likewise instruct and guide us as we, too, press on towards the goal set before us from baptism.
Julia Gatta is the Bishop Frank A. Juhan Professor of Pastoral Theology in the School of Theology, the University of the South, Sewanee, Tennessee. An Episcopal priest, she served parishes in Connecticut for 25 years before moving to Sewanee. She holds a Ph.D. in Medieval Studies from Cornell University. Mother Gatta is the author of The Pastoral Art of the English Mystics (first published in 1987 as Three Spiritual Directors for our Time) and The Nearness of God: Parish Ministry as Spiritual Practice (2010). Go in Peace: The Art of Hearing Confessions, written in collaboration with Martin Smith, appeared in 2012. Her most recent publication is Life in Christ: Practicing Christian Spirituality.
…
(1) All scriptural quotations are from the Revised Standard Version Bible (1989), Division of Christian Education of the National Council of Churches of Christ in the U.S.A.
(2) The Praktikos and Chapters on Prayer, ed. John Eudes Bamberger (Spencer, MA: Cistercian Publications, 1970), 18-19.
(3) Esther de Waal, Seeking God: The Way of St. Benedict (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1884), 13.
(4) Terrence G. Kardong, Benedict’s Rule: A Translation and Commentary (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1996). Citations from the RB are taken from this edition.
(5) Anthony Bloom, “My Monastic Life,” Cistercian Studies 8.2 (1973), 189.
(6) Kardong, Benedict’s Rule, 24 and 473-74.