How to be a monk – Lesson three: Balance

It is possible that there are some people today who don’t dream about having a more “balanced” life but I don’t think I’ve met any of them.  The longing for “balance” seems to be a deep, heartfelt theme for many people.  Many of these people also see balance as an integral part of Benedictine life and spirituality.

I wonder whether people have taken much time (have much time?) to really think through what this “balanced” life would look like.  Perhaps for many people it is simply being less out of control, having a little more time for God and family and being less consumed with work and busyness.

All of these are very worthy goals but are they really Benedictine, monastic goals?  Benedict never uses the word balance in his Rule and if we look closely at the schedule he sets out for his monks we would probably blanch.  Benedict has his monks pray eight times a day, do two to three hours of individual prayer (lectio) every day as well as work in the field, do kitchen duty and all the various chores that make up everyday life.  Basically Benedict had his monks praying most of the day, either in chapel or in their private prayer times.  Most modern people are not looking for a “balanced” life that looks like the extreme prayer schedule of Benedict’s monastery.

But perhaps as modern people we miss the point of what Benedict was trying to do.  Benedict created an outward structure in the monastery in which people had to drop everything, interrupt their busy day and go to prayer eight times a day.  He had them devote prime hours of the day to their personal prayer.  Life in Benedict’s monastery was about constantly interrupting daily activities in order to prayer.  What was the result for his monks of this constant interruption day after day, year after year?  Perhaps eventually the habit of prayer would become so internalized in his monks that everything became prayer.  Eventually monks would no longer need to go to chapel to pray, they would no longer need to have scheduled times of lectio to have their personal prayer.  They would still do it, but the monks would come to see all of life as a constant prayer, a continual attitude of awareness of the presence of God.

Perhaps this is the true nature of Benedictine balance.  Balance isn’t about more time for things we like or even more time for prayer and God, it is about a life in which faith and our awareness of the presence of God permeates absolutely everything we do.  Balance is who we are, people who are aware of God in everyone we meet, everything we do, in all our thoughts, words and actions.

Balance is indeed a gift of Benedictine spirituality today, but it is a gift of living a life in which there is no longer a distinction between God, faith and the rest of our lives.

Do we own our stuff or does it own us?

I have been developing a theory that our stuff multiplies at night when we’re not watching. OK, so it isn’t a particularly rational theory, but admit it, how often do you look around and say “where did all this stuff come from!?”

This seems to be a universal problem in the developed world. No one seems to be immune from the plague of ever expanding piles of possessions. It is especially scary that even for those of us who live in monasteries stuff has a way of accumulating, multiplying and taking up all the space that we allot for it. Even monks and nuns aren’t immune from the tentacles of stuff.

St. Benedict, the founder of monastic life in the west, lived long before the era of cheap, disposable goods. But even in the 6th century when he wrote his rule for monks, he knew the dangers of accumulation. Although Benedict is generally very flexible and pragmatic about monastic life he takes a particularly hard line on the subject of possessions (the polite word for “stuff”). He says “….without an order from the abbot [leader of the monastery], no one may presume to give, receive 3or retain anything as his own, nothing at all—not a book, writing tablets or stylus—in short, not a single item, 4especially since monks may not have the free disposal even of their own bodies and wills. Rule of Benedict chapter 33:2-4

Unlike modern people Benedict wasn’t just worried that his monks would run out of room for their stuff, he knew that the danger was much deeper and more insidious. He knew that our possessions change how we think. The more we own the less freedom we have. Our belongings start to control our lives. Pretty soon we think we “need” all kinds of things. Next, our life is oriented towards accumulating those things that we have convinced ourselves we can’t live without. We need to work harder, make more money, spend more time shopping for all the belongings that we “have to have” or that we simply want in order to make us feel better. Before long we need more space for our possessions, we spend all kinds of time caring for them, maintaining them, sorting through them, cleaning them, getting rid of them, worrying about them. In other words pretty soon we don’t own stuff, it owns us.

When our stuff starts to own us, rather than vice versa, we have lost a fundamental sense of freedom. For Christians and other people of faith there is a fundamental freedom in knowing and experiencing the reality that everything, our very lives, are a gift from God. Ultimately, as Benedict reminds his monks, we don’t own anything, all that we think we own is really a gift that we don’t necessarily or even particularly deserve. If we are able to truly embrace this reality then there is a paradoxical freedom. If we aren’t entitled to anything, much less a house full of stuff, then we can begin to be grateful. Instead of complaining, feeling empty, focused on what we want, we can begin to just appreciate the gift of our most basic and fundamental possessions. Most of us live in houses that are palatial by the world’s standards. We feast at vast banquets every day. We have hot, running water on demand. Automobiles take us wherever we want to go, whenever we want to go. And those are just the material possessions.

Even those of us who live the contemporary monastic way of life don’t live up to Benedict’s strict standards. We don’t own a lot (we don’t have enough room to accumulate a lot!) but we do have personal possessions. But we do make a commitment to struggle with the siren song of stuff. In the monastery our temptations may not be much different from those outside the monastery but by living in community with a common commitment to a simple life centered on God, we can perhaps accumulate less stuff and become less enmeshed in its grip. Monastic life is a chance to begin to divest ourselves of a sense of entitlement. We have to take a cold, hard look at what we really need and not just what we want. It isn’t easy, one person’s “want” is another person’s “need.” But hopefully our common struggle is a witness that if we begin to disentangle ourselves from the tentacles of our possessions there is a possibility for a life of freedom, gratitude and peace, a reward that seems more than worth the cost of a lot of stuff. When we begin to really divest ourselves of our sense of entitlement, when we reach a place where we can just give thanks for what we have, then perhaps that is the place where transformation really begins.

Who Is Shouting At Us?

Who is this scruffy, odd, unkempt maniac who keeps shouting at us? In the first weeks of Advent John the Baptist seems to be everywhere in the Gospel readings. From the story of his birth to his encounter with Jesus at the Jordan there is something odd and disturbing about John. I have to confess that I have tended to skip over the accounts of John, wanting to get to the “good stuff” the real story, the coming of Jesus. But I suspect that on some level I want to ignore John the Baptist because of what he represents.

John the Baptist is more than a historical figure in the drama of salvation, he is more than a literary device to lead up to the birth of Jesus. John is also the voice of the strange, the unexpected, the rejected that shouts in our face and pulls the rug out from under our lives of comfortable complacency. John the Baptist lives deep in our souls, beneath our consciousness, in the dark places we would rather not go, proclaiming the things we don’t want to hear.

Everything about John strips bare the illusion that we know how things work. John heralds a new order in which nothing is predictable, nothing happens the way it is supposed to. John heralds the coming of God who will set the world upside down.

It is no coincidence that John’s birth was unexpected by human standards. Old, barren women don’t give birth. They don’t give birth years after such a thing was deemed impossible. Few of us had our birth heralded by an angel; our fathers were not struck dumb at the announcement of our birth. Everything about this birth shouts: “sit up! pay attention! look! something new is happening!”

After his birth John continues to do the unexpected. He lives in the wilderness, eating and clothed like an animal. The wilderness, the place where he chooses to live, is the place of demons, the place of danger and death. But since this is Scripture there is an inherent paradox here. The desert, the place that people associated with death, demons and danger becomes the place where the announcement of salvation comes from. In other words don’t look for the announcement of God’s coming to emanate from the places of established religion, comfortable faith and clear answers, look to the desert, to the darkness, to the place of fear, that is where the announcement of new life will come from.

So what is the figure of John the Baptist that dwells deep in our inner being, the feared and rejected part of ourselves that stands up and shouts about the coming of the new order? What parts of ourselves do we want to keep in the desert, keep in our deep inner closet and never open the door?

John the Baptist is the shouter, the doubter, the rejecter of social norms, the fearless wild man. John is the one who says that our God has not been domesticated, cannot be put in the box of our expectations. John lurks in our hearts and pokes us viciously when faith becomes easy or judgmental or simply routine and dull. John is the voice that grates like sandpaper and says there is more to faith than a dutiful hour on Sunday. John is the deep suspicion of cheap grace and facile sacraments.

But John is also the one who welcomes the parts of ourselves who are like the crowds who came to see him. There on the shore waiting for baptism are our shame, our fear, our anger, our hurt, our sense of rejection and inadequacy. The message and ministry of John the Baptist says that these rejected and marginal parts of ourselves are simply waiting to be embraced by God, the difficult parts of ourselves that will lead us to God. Faced and embraced our fear will become prudence and discretion. Our anger will be channeled into energy for building the Reign of God. Invited into the light of love our shame, rejection and inadequacy become the deep humility that creates room for God.

Listen! Do you hear him? Look! Do you see him? There on the margins, in the corners, in the wilderness of our hearts John the Baptist continues to shout and interrupt our pleasant lives. Today is the coming of God. Today is the coming of new life.

The Future of Religious Life and God’s Preferential Option for the Motley

It is popular today for people inside and outside of the Catholic Church to wring hands about the future of religious life. The number of religious is decreasing, the average age is increasing, fewer men and women are entering religious life to become sisters, brothers, priests. The word crisis is used frequently and a lot of ink is spilled about what to do and what it all means. But perhaps the lens through which we need to look at this “problem” is Scripture.

A number of years ago the Catholic bishops of Latin America said that it is clear from Scripture that God has a “preferential option for the poor.” I suspect that there is an even larger principle at work if we look deeply into how God works in history and the lives of people. God seems to have a preferential option not just for the poor, but also the motley, the unworthy and unexpected. People who seem to be at the top of the social pyramid according to the standards of the world seldom appear as key characters in salvation history.

If you look at key people in the Bible you see people like Sarah who was old and barren with some denial issues, Moses was a cowardly, stuttering murderer, David a murdering adulterer, Mary an unwed teenage mother, Peter, impetuous, cowardly and clueless, Paul had a serious anger management problem, and the list goes on. God doesn’t choose the people who have it all together to change the world. Indeed it seems that God prefers people with significant limitations through whom God can demonstrate divine power and transformation.

If this is the case then there may be hope for religious life. According to the world’s way of looking at things religious life is in trouble. But perhaps according to a divine plan this may be a time of God working to bring about something new and unexpected. Such an idea definitely seems crazy enough to work. Religious are a small group of increasingly elderly people who have intentionally given up a lot of what society thinks is important, family, money, autonomy, and chosen to live at the margins, focused on God above all, living a life of faith.

As people of the margins perhaps we can see more clearly and have something unique to offer from our vantage point. When we look around and see the motley crew that makes up each of our communities we also see that throughout history small groups of religious have made a disproportionate difference in society. Spreading the good news of the gospel, providing education, establishing health care systems, bringing about social change, demonstrating what it means to seek God in everyday life, these are all gifts of religious. These are the gifts of ordinary people who are far from perfect (a fact to which their sisters and brothers in community will readily attest) who have banded together to do extraordinary things by relying on the power of God rather than being an elite group of the powerful. Religious are people who can readily identify with the Apostle Paul who said “my strength is made perfect in weakness.”

So perhaps the reports of the demise of religious life are somewhat premature. This may be a time for a necessary demise of some aspects of religious life. This may be a time for the death of complacency, for the end of a reliance on large numbers, security and easy answers. The future of religious life may be about embracing the difficult paradox of faith, that limited, motley, unexpected people are often or even usually the one’s God chooses. The future of religious life may involve a tremendous freedom of having nothing to lose, of being able to risk new exciting things since the world seems to think we are dying anyway. Perhaps the members of religious life need to say that if everyone is so sure that we are dying then at the very least we can go out in a blaze of glory, creating new visions and new ways of building the Reign of God. Perhaps the future of religious life means embracing the reality that as religious we may finally be marginal enough, motley enough, small and powerlessness enough to truly be instruments of God’s radical healing of the world. After all, it is only through death that resurrection comes.

Chores and Love

What do chores have to do with love? Unless we are talking about the occasional person who has a passion for cleaning or doing dishes the two don’t seem to naturally go together. But as is often the case Benedict in his Rule for monks understood that the most ordinary activities of everyday life have a profound significance.

In writing a chapter about kitchen servers he says that no one is to be excused from kitchen service except for a very good reason because “…such service increases reward and fosters love.” (RB 35:2) In a long chapter he explains at length how monks are to serve at meals. There is a ceremony at the beginning of the week to install the kitchen servers of the week and the ceremony echoes the way new members enter the monastery. In other words every week as they begin to take their turn serving meals the monks are reminded of why they entered the monastery, their commitment to seek God and serve one another in community life.

I have been thinking about this because last week a new chore list came out. Like every group of people living together we have to decide who does what chores to keep the place going. There are always dishes to do, rooms to clean, floors to sweep and a thousand other little tasks. Everyone except the most infirm has a job or usually several jobs to do. The chores are changed periodically as peoples schedules change, they move or simply can’t do the job any more.

Of course today or in Benedict’s time probably no one ever came to enter monastic life because they were drawn by the spiritual significance of being a kitchen server or a dish washer. Most of us came with lofty expectations of how we would find God through prayer and ministry. But if we stay here long enough we eventually realize the wisdom of Benedict. It isn’t hard to find God in the chapel and the daily prayer, but the real trick is to find God in the pots and pans, the vacuuming, the common work that makes up daily life.

We don’t have a ceremony anymore at the beginning of the week to designate who will be doing what service. Perhaps that’s too bad, it is easy to lose sight of the purpose of common work. Benedict was certainly worried that the soup would be served hot and on time but he was more worried that the monks realize that by mundane acts of service they were demonstrating their love for one another. The point wasn’t to hurry up and get through the chores, it was do the chores in a way that each monk was serving his brothers as Christ would.

In our chores we are given daily chances to get past ourselves and our sense of self-importance. It is hard to get carried away with yourself while sweeping a floor, re-stocking napkins or being up to your elbows in greasy pots. And that is the way it should be. Each of those things and many more are critical to creating a place where we can be about the spiritual life, where we can be about the work of transformation. Each of the little daily chores gives us a chance to demonstrate love and service in ways that are humble, unspectacular, but necessary. The chores are a way to help us realize that no matter what we may have thought, monastic life is not about great feats of asceticism or spiritual grandeur it is about love that is demonstrated every day in my small, unnoticed ways.

Discernment: God whispers, shouts, nudges and pulls

As I settle in to my new job as vocation director for the monastery it is amazing to listen to and reflect on peoples experiences of coming to the monastery. I listen to a lot of people as they discern where God is leading them, what the next step in their life will be. This can be a confusing, exciting, difficult, wonderful time. When anyone is discerning a major decision, especially regarding entering religious life, it is an adventure through what may seem like uncharted wilderness.

It is the essence of wilderness to be uncharted, but nonetheless there seem to be some patterns that I have noticed in working with people and from having done my own discernment of religious life. Some of the signs of call seem rather obvious, some are very subtle and they all require plenty of time and space and honesty to sit with them in order navigate the wilderness of God-inspired decision making.

Signs of Call

Persistence: It would be wonderful if we could just wake up one morning simply knowing what we were supposed to do next, where God wanted us to be. Sometimes that does seem to happen, but if it does it might best beware. Call is something that tends to take time to become clear and if it is right it will remain right. How many people have jumped into bad marriages because they were instantly sure and wanted to act immediately? A call is something that probably takes a while to become clear, but even if it happens suddenly, it will continue over time. Call is something that won’t let you go. Like Jonah running to Nineveh you can’t escape.

Motivation: Why do you want to make this decision, whether entering religious life or some other decision that you think is God’s call for you? This is tricky. None of us makes a conscious decision to say: “I want to do this because it will feed my ego on a deep level.” It is very difficult to be completely, totally honest with ourselves and recognize our deepest motivations. We have to take the time to keep going deeper, to keep peeling back the layers of motivation. Do I want to enter religious life because God is calling me or because I think it would be a comfortable way of life? Do I want to make this change because God is calling me or because my family always pushed me to do this? Stripping the layers to see our deepest selves and our motivation takes time and work.

Rightness: There is a deep level of recognition that often comes with vocations or other decisions to follow God’s call. On one level the decision may seem unexpected, impractical or just plain crazy, especially on a practical, rational level. But the practical, rational level is often not the level of discernment. After considerable time and searching there may come a deep, intuitive sense that the decision is right. Possibly crazy and unrealistic, but right on a deep level. The rightness does not mean that it isn’t scary, that there aren’t lots of obstacles, but that in the center of your being it is the life-giving way.

Signs to Watch Out For
There are plenty of positive signs in discerning a vocation or any other decision regarding following God’s call, but there are also some warning signs. All of us can be very skilled at deluding ourselves into thinking that we are following God rather than recognizing our own needs and desires at work.

Cost: The poet T.S. Elliot had a line that seems to summarize religious life perfectly: “a condition of complete simplicity costing not less than everything.” One of the hardest things to grapple with in looking at religious life is what it will cost. Most people can see the simplicity, having to give up some of their belongings or having less contact with their families, but there is more. We come to a way of life that asks us to go from being an individual in control of our life, or at least feeling like we are in control, to a state of being interdependent with others and with God. We come and give up our previous life, the roles we have played, our status and accomplishments and we totally start over again. Coming to religious life will give us more than we can imagine, but it may cost more than we can imagine.

Wherever You Go There You Are: Sometimes people come to religious life thinking that they have finally found a group of people who will really love them and support them. And if anyone comes to a healthy community that will be the case. The problem is that no group of people will be able to fix the hole in your heart. Each of us comes to religious life with our patterns of relationships, our woundedness, our issues and we won’t be instantly changed when we walk through the door. A religious community is not so much a place where we will be healed as a place where we realize we are in need of healing. If your need for healing and affirmation is too great this may not be the way of life for you.

No Generic Religious Life: When discerning a vocation some people seem to think that there is a generic call to religious life. They feel God is calling them and seem ready to quickly settle on the first place that will talk to them or is willing to let them enter. This is like marrying the first person that comes along who is single and is also looking to get married. The fit of religious life is deeply personal and mutual. There is a long, elaborate dance between the community and the aspirant. Is there a match? Do I like you? Do you like me? Will this work? Religious communities are not like brands of vanilla ice cream, one is not basically the same as the others. You can’t just pull one off the shelf and expect it to be fine.

Conclusion
Maybe the bottom line in discernment is that it is God’s process, not ours. We continue to listen deeply, attentively, honestly. We learn to face our nakedness before God, our deepest wants, needs, desires. We have to face our brokenness and our goodness, our failings and our tremendous gifts. In discernment we get out of the way and listen to God pulling, pushing, nudging and coaxing us into the way of new life. It is a place where the wilderness will blossom with new life.

Of Time and Bells

Before I entered the monastery time seemed to be bounded primarily by work and weekends. Monday morning was the beginning of the work week and Friday night was a time of anticipated break and relaxation. There were other markers of time but like most people my experience of time was focused on work.

Time in the monastery is quite different. This week I am “on bells” which has made me reflect on what monastic time means. To be “on bells” means this week I am responsible for the signal to community that it is time for prayer. Ten minutes before each scheduled community prayer time I will ring a chime over the phone system signaling everyone to stop what they are doing and come to prayer. I will then ring one of the four big bells in the sacristy that will let everyone in the area know it is time for prayer.

According to Benedict when anyone hears the signal for prayer they are to stop what they are doing and proceed to the chapel for the appointed office of prayer. In other words the day is not defined by work, it is defined by prayer. Work is what is fit in between the times for prayer. Prayer is the primary work of the monastic and everything else is what has to be done in order to support that time to stop, gather together and come before God in praise and supplication.

It can be hard to get used to the “interruptions” in the monastic schedule. It never seems to fail that just when you are finally settling down and getting something accomplished the bell rings. All of us in the monastery are products of our predominant culture, we tend to define ourselves by the work we do and how much we accomplish during the day. So the constant interruption of the bell can be a constant shock and reminder that we have chosen to live in a different world.

The bells say stop, listen, pay attention. What is your priority? What is your real work? Why are you here? The bells create a rift in the seamless day, the bells force us to stop, they can be a violent invitation to a profound gift. The bells say stop, enter another world, a world of silence where God will whisper to your heart, a world where everyone strives to speak in the same voice of praise and lament. The bells puncture our routine, our safe and controlled world and let in our unpredictable God who invites us to transformation.

Listen for the bells in your life. They are all around. Perhaps it is your turn to be “on bells” for the people in your life. The invitation is always there, the chimes are sounding, it is time to go and pray. It is time for the real work of your life.

Finding God in the Dishes

As I do more spiritual direction with people I usually talk to them about how they find God in their prayer life, in Scripture, in worship, in nature and other ways. I don’t think I have ever asked how they find God in the dishes, but I think I might start.

A contemporary Buddhist monk, Thich Nhat Hahn once asked someone who was visiting his monastery and had volunteered to help wash the dishes: “do you want to wash dishes to wash dishes or do you want to wash dishes to have clean dishes?” He meant do you see washing dishes as a means to an end or are you willing to simply be present in whatever you are doing whether washing dishes or going to prayer.

Benedict doesn’t ask that question but I think his attitude is similar. For Benedict every aspect of life is about God, every aspect of life reflects how we are journeying toward God. Everyday tools are to be treated as “vessels of the altar.” There is an elaborate ceremony to acknowledge the monks who will be the kitchen helpers of the week and it echoes the liturgy for welcoming new members. In Benedict’s monastery the most mundane tasks are as important on the spiritual journey as the daily hours of prayer.

Benedict spends a lot of time explaining how the daily tasks and chores of everyday life should work. There are chapters on how much food and wine to have at meals. The clothing and bedding for monks has a place in his Rule. There are lots of “non-spiritual” details that people tend to skip when they read the Rule. But the reality is that these chapters are just as important as the ones that explicitly talk about God.

At first glance many of the provisions of Benedict’s Rule don’t seem to have any immediate bearing on our faith life. What difference does it make what kind of food we have or why does Benedict feel he has to make provision for how many clothes the monk should have or what kind of bedding they are to be given? As modern people we usually skip these parts of the Rule and see them as anachronistic. But perhaps some of the most “non-spiritual,” concrete provisions of the Rule contain some of the most profound wisdom.

Benedict knows that in the spiritual life it is often the most ordinary things that trip us up. We say we want to live a life focused on God but then we get so consumed by the everyday details of life that God is quickly relegated to the occasional special time or place. Perhaps this is why Benedict knows that details matter. He tries to set up an ordered way of life so that all the basics are taken care of and handled in such a way that people can indeed see God in everything.

Everyone, monks and married people, people in the 6th century or the 21st, need to have enough food, enough clothing, a realistic schedule, meaningful work, specified times for prayer, common expectations and consequences for breaking rules, in order to be able to see God in everything. Benedict wants to set up a way of life in which there will be no excuses for not being aware of God. If the monks basic needs are taken care of, if the monk knows that he or she is living a life of security, then there will be the time, the space and the energy to focus on the real work of life, coming to know God ever more deeply and coming to be remade in God’s likeness.

So what does this have to say to us today, to those who live outside monasteries or even those of us who live preoccupied lives inside monasteries? Perhaps it is simply a call to mindfulness, to be aware that we do indeed have space and time for God. Do we have to be preoccupied about the necessities of life? For most of us living in middle-class comfort in an industrialized country the answer is yes. Most of us have enough food, clothing, access to medical care. Most of us already have the life Benedict wanted for his monks, one in which we do not have to be preoccupied with getting the necessities of life.

Most of us are fortunate that we do not have to wash dishes while preoccupied with hunger. Most of us live lives that have achieved Benedict’s ideal of a life with the time and space for God. Now the question is our attitude. How do you wash the dishes? Is it to have clean dishes or to be aware of the presence and gifts of God in the moment? So, how do you wash dishes? How is washing dishes a reflection of your life with God?

What Constitutes Holiness?

What makes a person holy? Hopefully all of us are striving for holiness, hard at work on our spiritual way, becoming more Christ-like as we grow in our faith. But we also know that certain people are clearly farther along on the journey toward holiness. The saints are obvious examples of people who have led transformed lives, their witness has been formally affirmed by the Church. But we also know ordinary people whom we recognize as having achieved what Benedict would call the heights of humility.

In our community one such holy person has just died. Those of you who knew her won’t be surprised to hear Sr. Wilma Schlangen described as such a person. Of course if anyone had told her that she was holy she would probably say “Oh no!” in her inimitable Minnesota accent. But for the many people whose lives she touched there was something very special, very holy about Wilma.

Sr. Wilma had an ability to make everyone feel special. So many people came through her old kitchen and were warmly embraced, accepted and loved. Each person was made to feel absolutely unique. Many visitors would encounter Wilma in the course of a few days or even a few hours and feel like they had just met a friend for life. I never had the heart to tell any of them that Wilma made everyone feel that way and that she may not remember them because she met so many people and was so present to each one.

Perhaps the key to Wilma’s holiness, or any other exceptional person, is that God’s light shines through them exactly as they are with all their limitations. Holiness does not mean perfection, a lack of flaws, a person who is “too good to be true;” holiness is a quality that simply means that the rough edges have been smoothed out, they haven’t been eliminated.

Like all of us Wilma had her edges. In her 94 years Sr. Wilma walked a path of holiness through work. She worked incredibly hard, set herself incredibly high standards and expected other people to meet those standards. Many people shared memories of working with her in the kitchen and having her exclaim “oh, you’re not going to use that pot are you?” Many more people came through the old kitchen assuming that they already knew how to string beans, sort raspberries, crack walnuts or any one of multiple tasks, only to be very clearly told by Wilma exactly what they were doing wrong.

But Sr. Wilma was also a Benedictine in whom there was no guile. She was absolutely honest in all her interactions whether that was making someone feel absolutely loved and welcome or telling them they were cutting apples all wrong or saying with great concern “you have gained weight haven’t you?” But whatever she said there was only truth, and even if you were a disaster in the kitchen or garden you knew that Wilma still loved you.

Perhaps holiness is about having experienced God’s love without reservation, having come, through long years and perhaps difficult experience, to the place where the reality of God’s unconditional embrace is the clearest reality. In her life Wilma knew suffering, rejection, doubt. She struggled with what it meant to be a good religious, a good community member. But by the time she died, tired and ready to go “home,” she also knew that God’s light shone through her, not as a reward for her many years of hard work, but as the reality of God’s free gift of love. The holiness that Wilma manifest for all of us was that light, that love that simply radiated from her deepest being.

Wilma has completed her journey toward holiness. For those of us that come after her Wilma has given us the gift of seeing that holiness isn’t a denial of our fallible humanity but it is a celebration and transformation of our deepest selves. To be holy is to rejoice that we have been give the gift of being made in the image of God and that on the journey of life we become ever more like the God whose image we share. And so, with every raspberry we pick, with every person we meet and love, we remember Wilma, and know as she did, that we are embraced and loved by God just as we are.

"Prayer Ministry"

Periodically we update a list of the different ministries our sisters serve in. For example I am listed as co-director of oblates, volunteer coordinator and vocation team. Other sisters work in leadership, in different offices like development, in health care, in work at jobs away from the monastery, etc. Then there are a number of sisters who are listed as doing “prayer ministry.”

That listing always takes me aback slightly. I mean aren’t we all supposed to be about prayer ministry? Why are some sisters listed as having that as their defining ministry? The reality is that we list the older sisters who are in our infirmary and who no longer have an “active” ministry as the ones who now have prayer as their primary occupation. I always wonder, and worry a little bit that we may think that prayer is what is left when someone can no longer work, that we don’t value their new work of prayer as highly as their previous ministries. Our community works very hard and values hard work so that can color our perceptions.

I suspect the reality is that these sisters are the ones who have graduated to the real work of the monastery, the real work of any of our lives. They are at a place where they have to daily face their limitations, their weakness and frailties. These sisters are at a place where they have to depend on the help of others for daily tasks, bathing, dressing, getting places. They are living in a place of incarnated humility. They can no longer be defined by how hard they worked for many years, how many children they taught, patients they nursed or meals they prepared. Their life is now about essences. It is about the essence of faith: humility in the face of dependence, suffering that is endured in deep hope, prayer that is lifted up on behalf of the world.

In monastic life we live in community seeking to be transformed, seeking to get past our “self-will,” our egocentricity that both helps us to face the challenges of the day but also gives us the illusion that we are the center of the universe. Through the challenges of monastic life, and there are never a lack of challenges, we seek to become transformed, icons of God in a world that needs beauty, salt and leaven in a world that is often insipid and shallow. But most of the time we are taken up with the important, and very necessary chores that need to be done. We need to support ourselves. Daily tasks have to be done. “Active” ministries have to be attended to. God is present but so is the pervasive illusion that we are in charge.

But for the sisters whose primary ministry is prayer, that illusion is being stripped away. Prayer, a deep, naked being before God in supplication, adoration, or simply presence, begins to take over. This is the real work, the deep work of being changed, it is real purpose of monastic life and too often we only come to it in a deep way at the end of our lives. And so I give thanks for these women who are about our most important work.

Feast of St. Benedict

Happy Feast of St. Benedict!

For those of you who are wondering, this isn’t the big, official Feast of St. Benedict which is celebrated by the Church on July 11th. March 21st is celebrated by Benedictines as the date of the death of Benedict. Since it is Benedict and we are Benedictines we figure we are entitled to celebrate twice.

It is a big feast day here at the monastery. That means we have a Sunday schedule, special prayers from the feastday office book, the dining room is decorated, special placemats with Benedict are on every table and everyone is dressed up. It is a day when a number of us made profession, there will be a lot of reminiscing around the dinner table.

Since this commemorates the death of Benedict, I thought I’d reflect a little on what that meant to Benedict.

For Benedict death was very clearly the entry into eternal life, the culmination and goal of a life time centered on the work of conversion and transformation. In chapter 72 of the Rule he entreats God to “bring us altogether to everlasting life.” Everlasting life for Benedict is something that happens in the context of community. We are responsible for one another in our work of conversion. Benedict’s is not a spirituality of “me and Jesus,” he sees this life as a journey in the company of our sisters and brothers and we are responsible for one another. We run this race together. Benedict would say we don’t have an option of leaving the slower ones behind or of allowing the faster ones to go on ahead of us. We are community, we go to God together.

The only information we have about Benedict is a hagiography (biography of a saint) written by Pope Gregory the Great in the 7th century. At the end of this work he describes the death of Benedict:

“Six days before he died, he gave orders for his tomb to be opened. Almost immediately he was seized with a violent fever that rapidly wasted his remaining energy. Each day his condition grew worse until finally, on the sixth day, he had his disciples carry him into the chapel where he received the Body and Blood of our Lord to gain strength for his approaching end. Then, supporting his weakened body on the arms of his brethren, he stood with his hands raised to heaven and, as he prayed, breathed his last.”

Here we see the same motif as in the Rule, even as he died Benedict is literally upheld by his community. They support him as he had supported them to run the way of the Gospel. He ran the way of faith with his community and they would continue to run the way guided and supported by his example.

Our communities, whether cenobitic or oblate, are very different than Benedict’s, but the principle is the same. Our faith life is lived in community. Community doesn’t just mean people we like and choose and who are similar to us. Community often means people that challenge us to grow precisely because we would not have chosen them! Benedict knew this when he called his disciples to support “…with the greatest patience one anothers weaknesses of body or behavior.” In patience we become the presence of Christ for one another, knowing what it is to uphold someone just as they will hold us up at the times we need.

Community is an exercise of humility. We are reminded of our weaknesses, our limitations and at the same time stretched to offer our gifts on behalf of those who share our spiritual commitment. It is humility to continue in commitment even when it is difficult and stretching for any variety of reasons. In the rough edges of community we come to realize that we cannot rely on ourselves, we come to depend on God who often takes the guise of the people who we most like to get away from. Rugged individualism and self-reliance are not Benedictine values.

For Benedict death was the ultimate point of transformation and it happened as he was held up by the same community that had both supported and challenged him throughout his life. Death was the destination of the journey that would now continue into eternity. While we celebrate the moment Benedict ended his race, let us keep in mind that all of us are still on the way, still supporting and encouraging one another toward the destination of our final transformation.

Social Networking - Web 2.0

When I first came to the monastery no one had e-mail, there wasn’t a monastery web site and the people who invented Facebook were probably still in elementary school. Back in the Dark Ages of the late 90’s much of what we take for granted today was still relatively new. Admittedly we at the monastery were still slow on the technology curve even then but it was a different, much less connected world.

Today our community communication is largely by e-mail, everyone who needs a computer for work has one and we focus on keeping our website up to date. However, the new phenomenon of “social networking” is a little slower to catch on. A few of us are trying Facebook, although personally this “friending” business gives me some very traumatic flashbacks to the junior high school social pecking order. As far as I know there have not been any “Tweets” coming out of the monastery although someone may have a secret Twitter life I don’t know about. Some of this reluctance or cluelessness about the new networking styles may be age related, some this stuff makes more sense if you’re under 30. But I also wonder about how all this fits with being monastic.

In some ways Benedict invented social networking. When you live together, 24/7, for the rest of your life, you don’t really need a virtual post to tell everyone what you are doing at any given time. Even if they had computers I suspect that Brother Maurus never would have needed to answer the Facebook question: “What are you doing right now?” Everybody would know what he was doing, he would be at prayer, he would have his week as kitchen server, it would be time for lectio (prayerful reading) or everyone would know that he was sneaking behind the kitchen for a cigarette or trying to get a few more minutes of sleep before the bell. In community everyone knows what you are doing at any time.

But our society in general has lost any sense of connection. We live alone or in small families. We value our separateness, our “space.” We want lots of land around our houses, sound-proofing in our apartments. We value our autonomy and independence. We bristle at anyone making decisions for us. We hop from one relationship to the next while both fearing and longing for commitment. In the web of social relationships we are society of spiders dangling from the end of the web not sure how to get back to interconnectedness.

This is probably where the new social networking phenomenon comes in. We have become so isolated, so independent that we don’t really know how to relate in person. We don’t live together. We are fearful of strange people while at the same time we don’t live close to our friends and family. And so we reach out in “virtual” relationships. We long to feel connected, to share ourselves, to know we aren’t alone, that someone is interested in who we are and what we are doing. We are assuaging a deep loneliness we don’t want to admit we have.

In the monastery there are real connections. Not easy connections, not always “nice” connections. The relationships can be as painful as they are profound, sometimes they are superficial, sometimes they reflect a deep sense of God’s presence. But they are very real. This monastic version of social networking is how we are transformed. We live together, pray together, work together and hopefully learn to see the presence of God in one another. It is a struggle, it is hard work, but what is at stake is nothing less than life. Our “network” in the monastery is nothing less than how we travel together on the spiritual journey. In the words of Benedict: “Let them prefer nothing whatever to Christ, and may he bring us altogether to everlasting life.” This is the ultimate “friending.”

Humility

62 The twelfth step of humility is that a monk always manifests humility in his bearing no less than in his heart...65 and constantly say in his heart what the publican in the Gospel said with downcast eyes: Lord, I am a sinner, not worthy to look up to heaven (Luke 18:13).

67 Now, therefore, after ascending all these steps of humility, the monk will quickly arrive at that perfect love of God which casts out fear (1 John 4:18). 68 Through this love, all that he once performed with dread, he will now begin to observe without effort, as though naturally, from habit, 69 no longer out of fear of hell, but out of love for Christ, good habit and delight in virtue.
RB 7:62-69


I want to skip over the twelfth step of humility and go right to the top of the ladder. All the talk of judgment is off-putting, feeling guilty, beating my breast, saying I am a sinner. I want to say “I’ve worked way too hard to give up my self-esteem, let’s skip to the nice part.” But of course as soon as I say that I have to admit that frankly I’m lazy, I want all the wonderful feelings and benefits without any work. I want what Bonhoeffer called “cheap grace.” I want God to do all the work in me and I just stand back and bask.

The earliest monastics knew on a deep level what it meant to rely on God’s grace. They knew they couldn’t earn salvation or humility or grace. But they also knew that they had to take responsibility for how they lived their lives and their faith. God is the cause and the source of our humility, but how do we show that God is working in our lives?

Benedict uses the story of the Publican and the Pharisee as an example of humility. The story of the Publican who cannot raise his eyes to heaven always hits me like a blow to the chest. What must it feel like, to have a great yawning chasm of emptiness in your deepest soul? To know you are so far from God that you can’t even look up, to be so far from holiness that you are afraid that you will be swallowed up in the ocean that is God.

And yet he is the one whose emptiness is filled with God. He had no ego, no complacency, no self-satisfaction to cover up the deep hunger and longing for God. The publican had looked into the abyss and not turned away.

This looking, honest acknowledgment of emptiness will allow him to be filled by God. It is like the story about the man who goes to see the guru. He excitedly tells the spiritual master everything that he is doing to meditate, fast, read Scripture, visit monasteries, and on and on. The guru asks the man if he wants some tea. The man says yes while continuing to talk about all he is doing. The guru pours tea into the cup and keeps pouring even after it overflows. The man finally notices and is alarmed, “what are you doing?” The guru tells him that he is like the cup, as long as he is so full of himself there will be no room for God.

Humility is the emptiness of the cup, the emptiness of the publican. Stripped down, bare and empty. To be humble is to be shed of the warm, comfortable, protective garments of self-control, entitlement, complacency, and knowledge. In humility we come to our absolute nakedness. When we are stripped, open, poor and exposed we can finally open our eyes. Then, for the first time, our eyes are opened and we find that we are back in the garden, walking with God in the cool of the evening.

Volunteers

Among other jobs I am the volunteer director at the monastery. For about ten years now we have had people come and stay with us as volunteers. They help at various tasks in the monastery. Women live in the monastery and the men in one of the guest houses.

It wasn’t an easy program to start. It was something new, having people living and working with us who weren’t members of community. People were concerned about privacy issues, having people share our lives who weren’t part of us. There were fears and doubts as there always are with something new.

But now, ten years later, I don’t think we can imagine life without volunteers. We have had amazing women and men from all over the world from different backgrounds and experiences spend anywhere from a few days to a few years with us. The volunteers do everything from helping with housekeeping to answering phones and helping in the garden. In exchange they get to see monastic life as it is lived by one particular motley crew of women in rural Idaho.

It is an exchange that is helpful to all of us. The volunteers pretty quickly learn that nuns are quite human. Some are easier to get along with than others. We aren’t all perfect plaster statues. We struggle and fail like everyone else. The volunteers see that monastic life isn’t easy, it isn’t a matter of floating along in a cloud of prayer, it is hard work to live and pray together day after day and year after year.

In turn the sisters are able to see monastic life through the eyes of new people. We see that our way of life really is unique and that people appreciate the integrity of our struggle; they don’t expect us to be perfect. Volunteers give us the gift of spending time with amazing people who have a sense of adventure, who aren’t afraid to do something unique and different like spending a few weeks at a monastery. The volunteers are usually spiritual seekers, they know that God is speaking to them and they are searching for ways to listen. They are a good reminder to us that God speaks in many languages to various people but together we are trying to listen to the divine voice.

An image that is common in monastic history is that of the desert. Early monks went to the silence of the desert to escape the pull of the world’s values. In the desert they built oases, alternatives to the way of life they left behind, places where the search for God could be honored. Perhaps today in the cacophony and dryness of our secular, consumer culture, the monasteries are still oases. For a brief time our volunteers can glimpse what it is like to engage in the hard work of journeying together toward God. We welcome their company on the journey.

Everyday Life: Nakedness and Mirrors

“…supporting with the greatest patience one another’s weaknesses of body or behavior.” RB 72:5

Before I came to the monastery I read a wonderful book by a journalist who spent several months living in Trappist men’s monasteries. The Trappist’s are a monastic order that is strictly enclosed, they do manual labor to support themselves rather than ministries that require them to go outside. The author got to know the monks very well and writes about several in depth conversations including one with an abbot who said “you know, we walk around naked here.” Of course he didn’t mean physically naked, but naked in the sense that when you live with a small number of people, in an enclosed space, for years on end, pretty soon there is nothing you don’t know about them. You get to know all their moods, their pet peeves, whether you should even try talking to them before they have had their coffee in the morning. There is nothing hidden in a monastery.

After a few years of living in my monastery I thought that I could amend what the abbot said. I would say “we walk around naked in a house full of mirrors.” But pretty soon when you live with people day after day you realize that you aren’t just seeing them, you realize that you are looking in a mirror day after day. All the things that you see in another person that seem so irritating are really your own problems being mirrored back to you.

When I first came to the monastery there was one woman who seemed to have the power to irritate me to no end. I could tell it was irrational, she was a perfectly nice person, but there was something about her that felt like finger nails on the blackboard of my psyche. It took years of everyday living, seeing her in the hallways, chapel, dining room, living with her, before I realized what it was. Somehow, on some very deep, unconscious level, I saw in her my deepest fears about myself. When I saw her she became me at 12 years old, back in the deepest, most painful depths of junior high school, those years that I, and most people, shudder to even think about. Knowing this woman was like constantly walking by a magic fun house mirror that showed only images of my deepest insecurities.

Of course if we look carefully we also see what we can be. The mirror also reflects our deepest gifts, our wisdom, how we will be transfigured and transformed by our faithfulness to this way of life. There are many women in the same hallways, dining room and chapel that I hope to become. When I look at them I hope I am looking into a mirror of my future. A future when I no longer see that image of 12 year old angst, but a figure of patience, humility, ability to love even the most difficult people, able to inspire and teach.

This is the odd gift of the monastery. You can’t remain cloaked in your illusions about yourself. Most of us can manage to have our act together for large parts of the day, while we are at work, for long periods of time in our lives, but if you live in the monastery there are no illusions, you are forced to look in the mirror. Every day, reflected back at you are both the sags, wrinkles, scars and warts that you try to cover up. But at the same time there is the luminous reality that we are truly the image of God, the light of God shines in us and through us.

Listen: The Journey Begins

“Listen carefully my son, to the master’s instructions, and attend to them with the ear of your heart.” RB Prol. 1:1

Listen: God whispers, shouts, begs, pleads, commands and entices. Do you hear it? In the grating shallowness of a life increasingly limited and tasteless something beckons. Something more, something unseen that flees from your direct glance. Something darts about at the edge of your mind playing “catch me if you can.” Little tendrils of longing tickle and tease your soul. More, there must be more.

Listen: Tag, you’re it! Now, bitten, smitten and longing, you’re one of the holy fools and Godstruck, you’ve joined their ranks. Something has happened. Puzzling, unexpected and unlikely the journey begins. It is a journey of the heart, not the mind, a journey whose map is ridiculous whose destination is absurd.

Listen: Strange voices echo, reverberate and pull. Old words and voices of forgotten ancestors pull you to prayer and silence and places apart. Dream figures of people who dwell apart, dwellers in the soul’s desert, they whisper and entice you.

Listen: Somewhere (which is everywhere and nowhere) God chortles, the Divine Trickster has caught you and pulled you and dragged you into the depths. This is the God whose greatest delight is to know you are seeking because God is waiting to be found, there, hiding in plain sight.

Everyday Life: Short Hair, Long Skirts, Rules and Culture

1The clothing distributed to the brothers should vary according to local conditions and climate,
7Monks must not complain about the color or coarseness of all these articles, but use what is available in the vicinity at a reasonable cost.
20The abbot, however, must always bear in mind what is said in the Acts of the Apostles: Distribution was made to each one as he had need (Acts 4:35). 21In this way the abbot will take into account the weaknesses of the needy, not the evil will of the envious… RB 55:1,7, 20-21


A while back a young woman who was visiting our monastery asked rather tentatively “do you have to have short hair to live here?” I guess it would look that way, short hair, no make-up, sensible shoes, collectively sort of a “nun look.”
The question startled me at first, we certainly don’t have any rules about hair length or skirt length, or clothes in general for that matter. I suppose if I had more presence of mind I would have said: “Oh honey, it is SO much easier than long hair. Plus it is nice to be in a place where how comfortable the shoes are wins out over how they look.” But of course she was young and not yet at the point in life where pragmatism has begun to win out over appearance.

Many people, like this young woman, seem to assume that our dress and appearance in the monastery are deeply reflective of our monastic vocation. It is, but not in the way most people think. It is common for people to tell us that we should wear habits. I suppose this is also an unquestioned assumption that people should be able to tell us how we should dress, as if our clothing were something that the public should be able to decide for us. It is part of the sense people have that as nuns, vowed religious, we should stand out in some way that we should be easily identifiable. Some sisters continue to wear the habit as a public sign of their consecration, most in North America do not.

So what does clothing mean to a monastic? It seems clear from the Rule that clothing was an issue in Benedict’s day just as it is now. Clearly not everyone was happy about clothing in Benedict’s monastery. He wouldn’t have told the monks not to complain about the “color or coarseness” of their clothing unless of course monks were regularly grumbling over dishes about how Benedict got such a good buy on chartreuse monk’s cowls made out of burlap bags on sale at the 6th century equivalent of the outlet mall.

It seems likely that in Benedict’s day there was some distinctive monastic clothing, but clearly there are other values that reflect monastic clothing. Clothing has to be suited to local conditions and climate and available at a reasonable cost in the local area. Clothing is supposed to be about need and common sense. This seems obvious but the reality is that common sense has never been particularly common nor has the ability to distinguish wants and needs.

People who engage in regular “shopping therapy” would have trouble living in Benedict’s monastery or our own monastery for that matter. We have no uniform clothing, no habit or rules about what to wear. But at the same time no one is allocated any money specifically for clothes. A sister who knows she will need to buy some special, expensive clothing for the coming year, a new winter coat, professional clothes for a new job, can request money during the time when the community budget for the coming year is determined. But usually clothing purchases come out of one’s personal allowance, a small, monthly amount of personal spending money.

This means that buying new clothes is almost impossible, whether high end high heels or L.L. Bean, crunchy granola hiking boots. It is difficult to make a statement at either end of the fashion spectrum without money.

Most of us do our shopping at the less than fashionable “put and take table.” There is a designated place in the monastery for clothing donations. Anyone who has a piece of clothing she doesn’t need any more can put it out for anyone who wants it. Often friends, relatives, oblates and others will give used clothing to us rather than the thrift stores. When someone donates a large pile of clothing a notice will go up on the bulletin board that there are “new” clothes available for people to take.

There is little room for “fiber snobs” here, people who refuse to wear polyester out of principle. Nor is there much room for strong sentiments about colors, patterns or styles. Fit is not simply assumed but becomes a determinative factor in selection. Clothes are recycled after weight loss and gain, after spring cleaning and probably out of just plain boredom, since as we know the only things that will survive a nuclear holocaust will be polyester and cockroaches.

The reality of course is that those with excellent taste and a love of nice clothes, even without money, will always find a way to look better than those of us without taste. But for all of us a deeper principle is a work. Monastic “fashion statements” are statements of humility. They are not always statements about humility achieved, they are more often about humility that is struggled with, limitations that chafe and wants that can be overpowering. But ultimately “put and take” becomes a reality of freedom that in community all our needs can be satisfied, and when that happens our wants seem much less important.

Benedictine Christmas

Benedict doesn’t mention Christmas anywhere in the Rule. However, Christmas suffuses Benedictine life for all who follow it, monastic or oblate. Christmas is about the Incarnation. We celebrate the amazing, radical, profound mystery that the creator of the universe would deign to enter our messy, difficult, hurting world and share our human condition with us. In Christmas we see that God not only becomes human but enters into the world in the most vulnerable way, as a baby born to an unwed mother in a marginal land to an oppressed people. In Christ God takes the risk of ultimate vulnerability.

So what does the vulnerability of God have to do with Benedictine life? To be Benedictine means to be the presence of Christ for one another. In all our communities: our families, work places, churches, oblate groups, the monastery, we see Christ in one another. Benedict talked especially about seeing Christ in the sick and the visitors. I have always wondered why he singled out those two groups. Maybe it is because they are the ones who are most likely to interrupt our comfortable routines, to demand our time and attention without being able to give back. Perhaps it is the difficult, disruptive people who are the vulnerable presence of God in our midst. The people we don’t like, don’t have time for, who get on our very last nerve, the ones we feel justified in ignoring, these are the people who need our special attention. They ask that we recognize God in the form of the vulnerable and marginalized. The Incarnation we celebrate means that divinity is enclosed in unattractive as well as beautiful packages.

We also have to remember that we, too, are the vulnerable presence of God. Each of us is the image of God. Our human condition in all its messiness is what God chose to share. In Jesus God takes the risk of entering into all that is human. In his humanity Jesus knew love, betrayal, pain, fellowship. To celebrate the Incarnation we have to be open to risk. In our communities we share of our deepest selves and risk betrayal and hurt because that is part of the witness of Christ. The Incarnation says that we don’t refuse to love just because that love might not be reciprocated.

When we celebrate Christmas with integrity we enter fully into life. We open our hearts, our homes, our minds, our wallets, to the earth-shattering mystery that God is here among us sharing our humanity. God challenges us to be vulnerable with one another as he was. God challenges us to see the divinity in the most broken people. God challenges us to rejoice and see the absolute wonder and joy that is our human life in the flesh. May we celebrate this season of Incarnation with joy!

Blessings to all of your during this joyous season,

Community Rank

1The monks keep their rank in the monastery according to the date of their entry, the virtue of their lives, and the decision of the abbot. 8…someone who came to the monastery at the second hour of the day must recognize that he is junior to someone who came at the first hour, regardless of age or distinction.

10The younger monks, then, must respect their seniors, and the seniors must love their juniors. 11When they address one another, no one should be allowed to do so simply by name; 12rather, the seniors call the younger monks “brother” and the younger monks call their seniors nonnus, which is translated as “venerable father.” RB 63: 1, 8, 10-12

The daily reading from the Rule yesterday was about community rank. In practical terms this isn’t something that we pay much attention to in ours or most modern monasteries. In some ways that is too bad, because if we really reflect on what Benedict is doing we say how amazingly radical he was.

Americans like to pride themselves on being very egalitarian. “All men (and now people!) are created equal. We like to think of ourselves as the land of opportunity for everyone. We work hard at eliminating the “-ism’s” of racism, sexism, etc. But I wonder whether we are actually put to shame by a monk from an extremely hierarchical culture in the 6th century.

Benedict’s society was dealing with the collapse of the mighty Roman Empire, but the values of that society were in everyone’s bones. People’s status was determined by birth. Slave and nobility were stations in life that were pre-determined, not earned or deserved. Status was largely immutable and impersonal.

But in his new community, in the motley group of people who come together to seek God in the community, there is to be a new model of society. Rank, status in the new society, is not to be determined by birth, class, education, achievement, ability or any sort of personal characteristic. Rank is to be set by the time of entry into community. Status in this new society is determined by when a person answered the call to leave all and follow Christ.

Benedict reinforces this idea by insisting that members address one another not by first names but by titles of their new rank. A monk is to address someone who is ahead of her in rank by the title “nonna,” translated “venerable one,” and the older in rank are to address those behind them as “sister.”

In Benedict’s monastery this meant that an illiterate barbarian could and would “out-rank” the Roman noble who came to the monastery later. In fact, for the rest of her life the noblewoman would refer to a barbarian peasant as “venerable one” and the woman from a barbarian, frontier tribe would hear herself referred to as a “sister.”

In our community this means that a woman of the most modest ability and background is “ahead” of the woman with the most education or ability. The sister with a grade school education who does domestic work her whole life, the one who is never able to contribute much to community, is called “venerable one” by the sister with a Ph.D., the one who has been prioress, by the most capable sister in community.

And in Benedict’s society this happens every day. The most limited person is always assured that what matters is that she is here seeking God. The most gifted person is reminded that there are others ahead of her in coming to this way of life. This then is the only thing that matters. It doesn’t matter what gifts you were given, what you’ve achieved, what kind of person you are. There is no room for pride in the monastery, there is only room for seeking God. Together we are humbled by the reality that the only thing that matters is God and we come to God helped along by the most unexpected people who go ahead of us in the way.