How to be a Monk: The Surprise of Lent

Most people probably think that being a monk is very hard.  And since most people associate Lent with a rather dour season of sacrifice and penance, it would seem that being a monk during Lent is especially hard.  Our friend Benedict seems to reinforce this picture with the first phrase from his chapter on the observance of Lent:  “The life of a monk ought to be a continuous Lent.”  So,  is anybody else depressed and ready to become a Unitarian (at least during Lent)? (RB 49:1)

Of course you have to watch out for Benedict, he can be tricky.  While his chapter on Lent has plenty of expected asceticism, with fasting, prayer and giving up, there is also a surprise.  The surprise is what underlies the reason for these Lenten practices.  Why does Benedict have his monk take on extra disciplines?

The answer is that Lent is about joy.  No, really, Benedict does have both oars in the water.  Just think about it.  Lent is a preparation for Easter, the event that is the summit and ultimate meaning of our faith, that Christ has conquered death and led us into new life.  Now that is something to be rejoice in.

So perhaps Lent isn’t about wallowing in our sins, especially since most of us don’t need a lot of encouragement to think badly about ourselves, nor is it about feeling virtuous because we managed to give up Facebook for 40 days (or at least a couple of days).  Perhaps the meaning of Lent comes from what Benedict talks about when he tells his monks “… to wash away in this holy season the negligences of other times.” 

The “negligences” that most of us are prone to aren’t necessarily the fact that we drink coffee, eat chocolate, forget to prayer regularly, or the other traditional areas we focus on, perhaps we are negligent in our lack of joy.  Do we feel a deep-seated, profound joy at the coming of Easter?  During this Lent we can work on what keeps us from focusing on the most important aspects of our faith life.  What keeps us from joy, from love, from wonder, from passion?

The practices of Lent are designed to re-kindle the earth shattering reality of our faith.  We are invited to re-experience the transformative power of God’s love for us.  We are challenged to be shaken to our depths that we are people who stand at the empty tomb and whose lives will never be the same.

As Benedictine monastics what practices will help us shake off our negligences and re-awaken our joy this season?

Lent, joy and the heebie-jeebies

Our life should be a continual Lent. Is that a scary thought? I have to admit that the idea tends to give me the heebie-jeebies. Lent often seems to be overlaid with a lot of artificial asceticism and guilt and these are not the attributes I want to characterize my life. But in the Benedictine Rule which we follow Benedict said the life of a monk should be a continuous Lent. Fortunately the idea isn’t quite as off-putting as it first sounds.

Benedict devotes one entire chapter to the observance of Lent. And while he does strongly urge giving up something for Lent, he also says something very interesting about why we should do this. The purpose of Lent is to “look forward to Easter with joy and holy longing.” (RB 49:7) Now there’s an interesting concept, Lent is about joy and holy longing, and not guilt. Frankly that’s a relief because for me giving up things often just leads to failure and guilt. Instead, Benedict implies that the extra disciplines are simply designed to sharpen my sense of anticipation, of deep longing to experience the transformative power of God in my life. Lent is like anticipating a big event by marking off days on a calendar knowing that something wonderful is coming.

These practices of Lent are reminders that Easter is not simply a given, it is not something we can take for granted or be complacent about. By setting aside Lent as a sacred, anticipatory time we will experience Easter as the always new, always unmerited, always transforming gift of God’s grace in our lives. In other words whether or not I even try to give up something this Lent the practice and the anticipation will be about joy and longing.

There is something rather innocent about this attitude toward Easter. It brings to mind the simple excitement of small children anticipating Christmas. For small children the big event hasn’t yet been overlaid with obligation, pressure and guilt, it is still just a wonderful, magical gift. But as we mature we lose our sense of wonder about Easter just as we did with Christmas. We know how the story will end. The emptiness of the tomb evokes a yawn rather than trembling and wonder. Most of us are no longer capable of the earth shattering awe that is the essence of Easter. For most adults Lent has no sense of joyous anticipation but is a rather morbid dirge of sacrifice and asceticism. Perhaps a Benedictine Lent calls forth a peeling away of the attitudes keep us anaesthetized from the true feeling of Lent. Perhaps Lent is an excited anticipation of joy, a deep, wonderful aching for the ultimate gift of new life at Easter. Perhaps life as a continual Lent is a calling that all Christians, inside and outside the monastery, can embrace as we all “look forward to Easter with joy and holy longing.”

Giving Up Complacency For Lent

So what do monastics, whether monks, nuns or oblates have to give up for Lent? Most of us lead pretty simple lives, not a lot of possessions, a dedication to prayer and faith. I’m reminded of the joke that priests tell, that hearing the confessions of nuns is like being stoned to death by popcorn. No one is going to be startled by our attempts to be more holy. In his chapter on Lent Benedict emphasizes ascetical practices for Lent, giving up extra sleep, adding more prayer, that sort of thing. Personally I’ve never been sure that I end up being that much more holy or even that much more prepared for Lent through these kinds of practices.

I suspect that what I need to give up for Lent is something much more fundamental, much more foundational in my spiritual life. Over the years as I’ve read and re-read the Gospels the more I am convinced that for Jesus one of the most fundamental sins was that of complacency. Over and over in the Gospels most ostensibly holy people, the Pharisees, those who observed God’s commandments in the greatest detail and depth, were the ones that Jesus most often took aim at. The Pharisees were the good, holy people of their society but they took the presence, the action of God in their lives for granted. They did everything right, they did what God asked of them but they ceased to be shocked, amazed, stunned, overwhelmed and surprised by God. They were always in control in their faith lives, they had God all figured out. They were complacent.

In the face of this complacency Jesus came along and stripped, shattered and dismantled all their hard won faith and sense of control. Jesus shattered the safe, comfortable faith world of the Pharisees. He said that God cannot be taken for granted, God’s love and grace are meant to shock us and knock us flat on our backside every time we encounter them, day after day. What the novelist Flannery O’Connor described could easily apply to the message of Jesus: "When you can assume that your audience holds the same beliefs you do, you can relax and use more normal means of talking to it; when you have to assume that it does not, then you have to make your vision apparent by shock -- to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind you draw large and startling figures."

I won’t assume to speak to the experience of anyone else, Lent and conscience are very personal things. But I know that I tend to wince pretty hard when I encounter the Gospels and the self-satisfaction of the Pharisees. My faith journey tends to become nice and even and well paved, it is easy to coast or to assume that my hard work is the work of transformation rather than just the daily work that needs to be done. I find it easy to become the complacent Pharisee keeping God safely in a box.

So perhaps my Lenten challenge will be to cultivate a renewed sense of the power of God’s presence in my life. Thankfulness, awareness of the gift of God’s presence ought to cause me to tremble down to my toes. The knowledge of how deeply and indiscriminately I and all people are loved by God should take my breath away every time I think of it. The reality of grace is something that should knock me over every time I realize the wonder of the gift.

Perhaps this is the real gift of Lent, the gift of the ashes of Wednesday. Our repentance is not for the trivial sins that characterize most of our lives but for the big sin of taking God for granted. May our asceticism, our penance and our awareness during this season truly lead to the intense joy of Easter, the startling gift of God’s presence in our lives.

Monastic Practices: Bona Opera

In his Rule Benedict makes specific provisions for how the monks are to observe Lent. He starts out by saying that: “the life of a monk ought to be a continuous Lent.” He goes on to recommend that everyone undertake some ascetical practice to get ready for Easter. But he also says that the monk’s intentions have to be disclosed to the abbot who offers his prayer and approval of the Lenten practices.

Fifteen hundred years after Benedict wrote his Rule we are still practicing this. Every year during Lent we go through a process we call “bona opera,” which is Latin for “good works.” Every sister writes down what she intends to do for Lent and submits this to the Prioress who reads and blesses the intentions.

Part of this process involves having a meeting with the Prioress during Lent. It is a chance to talk about your spiritual journey, your ministry, the fact that this year, absolutely, without a doubt, you will give up chocolate. (This last one requires a courageous display of self-restraint on the part of the Prioress not to dissolve into giggles.) But seriously, talking to the Prioress is a chance to evaluate your life, whether your monastic life is truly “a continuous Lent.”

I suspect that the Prioress is considerably less interested in the specifics of our intentions regarding fasting, almsgiving and prayer than she is in knowing how we have internalized those practices. Giving up chocolate may be admirable, even if impossible, but the real question is whether we are fasting from the sort of murmuring and back-biting that destroys any community. Are we giving up a little bit of our budget money for a charity but failing to give of our time and energy to someone in our life who needs our support? Additional prayer has very little meaning if it does not translate into a transformed life.

Fortunately the Prioress already knows us very well. She knows where we struggle and where our gifts are. The point of the yearly bona opera isn’t about guilt and the memory of past good intentions. Bona opera is the gift of sharing our struggles together on this journey to eternal life with someone who understands that we are trying the best we can and who will bless us on the way.

The Compassion of Lent

On Wednesday we began Lent. There were the words we hear every day on this year about repentance, fasting, almsgiving and prayer. Ashes were distributed and each of us was left with her own thoughts as we again entered this season.

Once again I listened and felt that I wasn’t sure I really understood Lent or perhaps more accurately I felt that I wasn’t feeling what I should feel. I’m never sure what I should give up, I struggle to name my repentance, I feel guilty that I will probably fail in my intention to be a better person.

All these thoughts went through my head in a strange sort of Ash Wednesday déjà vu. But suddenly another word came into my head in a startling instant. Compassion.

It was a moment when I began to look at Lent not from my point of view but from God’s. I realized Lent isn’t about me, either my good intentions or my guilt. Lent is about God’s deep compassion for us, God’s desire for our wholeness and healing.
What God feels for us is not a desire for feats of ascetic discipline or even an acutely attuned sense of guilt and repentance. God looks at each one of us with a deep, encompassing, all pervading sense of compassion. The guilt, the resolution, contrition and even the confession of the lack of these feelings aren’t what God cares about. God simply reaches out and whispers, “quiet, listen, do you know how much I care about you?”

Perhaps we work on our determination to keep our resolutions, wallow in guilt, escape into holy reading because all of these are easier than simply surrendering into the overwhelming reality of God’s compassionate love for us. The resolutions, guilt and pious actions all allow us to remain in control, to determine how we will relate to God. And so we can continue to feed our secret, pervasive sense of self-determination.

Ultimately I suspect Lent is both much easier and much harder than we usually make it with our well-intentioned resolutions. Lent is easier if it is really about God’s compassion for us rather than our ascetic strivings. But the paradox is that letting go into the reality of God’s love can make the difficulty of our resolutions look like a walk in the park. Being enfolded in compassion requires a profound level of trust, a level of difficulty that dwarfs our resolutions to give up chocolate or coffee for a few weeks. Lent is a call not to focus on our own strivings but to let go into the reality of God’s deep longing for us.

The poet T.S. Eliot once said: “mankind cannot bear too much reality.” But perhaps that is what Lent is all about, facing the reality of God’s compassion and the paradox of how difficult that can be. And so Lent begins again and with it God’s ever open invitation.

Room for God in Lent

In chapter 49 of his Rule Benedict says that the life of a monk should be a “continuous Lent.” Next, being the realist that he is, he allows that most monks can’t manage to live at such a level of intensity. He urges his community to take Lent seriously, to “wash away the negligences” of other times and to give up some eat, drink, sleep or idle talk during Lent and to add to the usual measure of private prayer. He says that all of this will allow us to approach Easter with “joy and spiritual longing.”

At the monastery every year, following Benedict’s advice, we tell the Prioress what we are going to do for Lent, what spiritual practices we will undertake. This process is called “Bona Opera” meaning “good works.” Benedict mandates that people tell the abbot/prioress what they are going to do for Lent so that there will be accountability. Otherwise he feels that if monks take on some spiritual discipline without approval and blessing it is “presumption and vainglory.”

It has taken me a while to figure out what Benedict means and what Lent is really about for that matter. I’ve always struggled with how giving things up would make more holy. My limited experience has been that it just makes me more cranky. I’ve never been quite sure what to say I’m going to do for Lent, self-discipline is not my strong suit and there are days when I think deeper holiness is a lost cause.

This year though it is making a little more sense (I’m a slow learner.) Lent is not about extra spiritual practices to remind me how undisciplined and far from holiness I am (although that is true) the sacrifices and disciplines are simply about making room. The “negligences” that Benedict refers to are just the little accommodations of daily life that squeeze out God. The television, web surfing, fluffy books, craving for sweets, all those sort of things that seem too inconsequential to worry about, much less give up for Lent, do add up. They add up to time and psychic space that becomes increasingly crowded and busy with less room for God.

Perhaps Lent is simply a vacare Deo, an open space for God. We rein in the busyness, the compulsions, the distractions that consume us and allow ourselves some more breathing space, a retreat space that is carved out of daily life, in order to breath in the love of God that surrounds and enfolds us. Lent becomes a gift, not a burden or even a creative exercise in self-sacrifice, it is a resting place where we pause and realize that indeed we are looking forward to Easter, to new life in God with a deep, aching joy that we usually cover up with the compulsions that creep into our lives the rest of the year.

So this year I’m sure I won’t be any holier at the end of Lent, probably not much more self-disciplined, and there will still be too many distractions. But perhaps there will also be a glimpse of what Benedict was talking about, a deeper sense of the “joy and spiritual longing” that continually help us move toward the reality of Easter and our new birth in God.