Monasteries: Schools of Middle-Age Meaning

An interesting thing happened somewhere along the line in recent monastic life. Monasteries seem to have become largely about middle-age. Most of the women who are attracted to our way of life are middle-aged. Most of our retreatants are middle-aged. Most of our oblates are middle-aged. If you throw in the employees and volunteers there might be a little more variety but it would still probably average out to middle age. What on earth is going on?

When most of our sisters entered St. Gertrude’s they were quite young, most of them teen-agers or at most young adults. A few of them still talk about being one of the “old” ones if they entered at the ripe old age of 28 or 29. Now today it is a popular topic to wonder what happened to young people entering community or participating in other ways. So what happened to our “chronological diversity?”

As with most questions it is dangerous to posit an easy or simple answer, but perhaps we have trouble seeing the possibility that just as monasteries have always done we are responding to the needs of the times. Monasteries have never been about just one type of ministry, one way of being community, one way of being monastic. The flexibility and adaptability of Benedictine life has been one of the keys to the survival of monasticism. In the Church prior to Vatican II there was a tremendous need for Catholic education. Young women came to religious life, to St. Gertrude’s, to engage in an important, clear, tangible ministry. If you were a young woman who came to our community in 1960 you pretty much knew that you would serve the Church as a teacher or a nurse. It was a commitment to a life that seemed clear, that had answers, that had a specific ministry, that was set apart from and even above that of other people. This promise would have a great appeal to young people. Youth is about certainty and answers. Heroic self-sacrifice for a common ideal is something that stirs deeply in young hearts.

So what happened? Sisters aged along with the incredible winds of change in the Church and life become less simple, the answers less clear, a depth of understanding and maturity began to be required that had not been before. Ministry became a broader concept than it had been and choices proliferated. Religious life began to speak to new needs, new callings, new hungers. And so the world needs the witness and ministry of monastic life today as much as it did fifty years ago, but witness is of a different kind.

Perhaps that is why we often seem over-run with the middle-aged. Middle-age is the fruitful, scary, disconcerting, exhilarating time of life when everything seems up for grabs. Unlike youth this is not a time of answers or trying on new identities. It is a time when the answers seem to dissolve in your hand like cotton candy on a hot day. Middle age is a time when the mountains of achievement have either been climbed or abandoned and it is time to go deeper, to go inside and look for answers that used to be outside. In middle-age is the time for reflection, questions, wondering, slowing down and evaluating. In the middle of life it is time to look for meaning.

This is where monasteries come in. What is a monastery about if not meaning: deep, profound, fundamental, essential meaning. What is my faith; how do I pray; who is God; how do I love; why do we suffer; the questions of meaning that were ignored and passed by blindly are now huge stumbling blocks that seem to loom suddenly out of nowhere and threaten to hurl us headlong into our fears. But what is the school for the middle-aged, the school of meaning?

Perhaps modern monasteries are the new schools for meaning for the middle-aged. Benedict called his monastery “a school of the Lord’s service” and this is really the same thing. When people come to a monastery they are able to ask and explore the important questions of their life. Monasteries are necessarily not about answers but they are about being able to ask and live with the questions. And wrestling with questions that have no answers is perhaps the hallmark of middle-age.
Looking around the monastery there are lots of middle-aged fellow travelers, people on a new journey to know God and their faith in a new way, people who are beginning to suspect that the old answers and certainties are never coming back. Here at the monastery we just stand by the door and welcome people to the first day at this new kind of school.

Prayer of the Monastic Elders

Recently one of our elder sisters has taken a turn for the worse and it is hard to see her become even more diminished. It struck me though, that all of our elders, despite their challenges, come to prayer with us every day, three times a day. They participate to the extent they are able and we help them participate.

They are an example of an important aspect of monastic prayer, it is prayer to the end, the prayer of endurance, the prayer that continues through diminishment, suffering and letting go. For these elders prayer has become the essence of prayer, it is simply being before God in the presence and with the support of community. For many of them it is now prayer beyond words and concepts, it is the prayer at its most simple and real.

Perhaps this kind of prayer is the ultimate fruit of monastic life. Most of us we are about being busy, priding ourselves on how much we are accomplishing and sometimes being secretly resentful of having to interrupt our day with the call to prayer. But this busyness is an illusion, we think that all this work is really accomplishing something, that we are the important people in the community. But that is the advantage of praying in the midst of community. Those of us who are (relatively!) young and active are allowed to see the example of those whose entire lives have become prayer. They don’t interrupt their days to pray, their being has become prayer.

Our culture tends not to value people who whom it considers marginal, people whose diminishment due to age or disability makes them unable to compete in our work and results centered society. But of course monasteries should be an alternative to that culture. Hopefully we can be at least a small witness to that ultimate, alternative society, the Reign of God. In this Reign of God it is not the obvious people who are central but instead the margins become the center. The people who come closest to manifesting this new society are not the ones with the most degrees, the most important titles or who get the most work done. In this little group of people struggling to make the Reign of God become manifest the people at the center are the ones who look like they are on the margins.

I have a ways to go before I really enter into this new reality. I would rather pray with all my distracted faculties, conscious and aware of what I am praying, or at least conscious of my distraction. There will probably come a time when my prayer is as simple as some of our sisters and someone else will take me to prayer as a new generation prays the same Psalms and the same prayers and someone I’ve never met will give me the Body of Christ. I’m not ready for that yet just as probably none of our sisters ever thought she would be ready. The prayer of diminishment, the prayer of simply being is something that usually comes gradually. And that is appropriate since God’s grace is something that works on us slowly and gradually and it transforms regardless of how hard we work and indeed grace transforms us at the deepest level when we are unable to either resist or cooperate with it. So this is the prayer of our elders, the prayer of presence, the prayer of simply being, the prayer of witness. And this is their gift to us, a gift that if we are all lucky, we too will one day experience.

Liturgical Time - Deep Time

On Sunday we began Holy Week, the liturgical commemoration of the historical events in the last days of the life of Jesus of Nazareth 2,000 years ago. But we also entered into deep time, time that is not chronological, that speaks a truth of events that are re-enacted in our lives in an unconscious way.

The American writer William Faulkner once said: “The past is not dead, it is not even past.” Perhaps this insight is nowhere more true than in Holy Week. We do not just commemorate the historical events of Jerusalem two millennia ago, we become conscious of the ways in which we live out Holy Week in our lives every day.

On Palm Sunday we like to think that we are part of the cheering crowd, standing there waving palms and welcoming Jesus the Messiah into Jerusalem. After all, we think, we would have been among those who understood and supported Jesus from the beginning. It is easy to be caught up in the crowd’s wave of adulation, to be part of the energy of the collective, to ride the tide of excitement and fervor.

But in our monastic celebration for Palm Sunday we follow the traditional practice of reading the account of the Passion on this day. We enter into the excitement of the crowd on Palm Sunday but we look forward to the fickleness of the crowd that will shortly be crying for blood. It is interesting that when the Passion narrative is read in public the part of the crowd is read by those in the pews. Those of us who are spectators at the liturgy once again become the spectators who were there in Jerusalem. And this time we are not on the side of the angels. On this day we become part of the crowd who has turned viciously on Jesus in the space of a few days. We go from adulation to retribution, from palms to cries of blood lust. The tide has turned and we along with it. We are the crowd crying out “crucify him, crucify him!”

What has happened in these few days, what has happened to us? There was a palpable sense of hope in the triumphant entry into Jerusalem. Here was the Messiah, the Savior, the one who would make everything right, who would come in triumph to inaugurate a new order. But the new order was one of humility and suffering not power and might. The way would be neither quick nor easy. Then as now we are easily disappointed, we want simple answers and we want them now. Like spoiled children with short attention spans we have no patience for anything but having our way and having it now. The anger and disappointment of the crowd wells up in us still today. We want the easy way, the way of someone else doing the hard work for us. We don’t want the way of the cross.

And so most of us sit in comfortable churches and chapels, the words speak of experiences and emotions that are distant, detached, far from our immediate experience. But perhaps the call of entering into the Passion, entering into the events of this Holy Week, is to experience them as real and present. If we enter into the reality of Holy Week we will see that we are part of both the supportive, cheering crowd and the angry mob crying for violence. We will be the ones who feel the poignant service of foot washing on Thursday. The pain of the torture of crucifixion will be ours on Friday. On Saturday the darkest despair will give way to hope as we pass over from darkness and death to light and life.

The call of this time is to be conscious, to be present, to enter into that deep time that is never past bu always present. We are called to live these stories, to know that they are not part of some long-ago, antiseptic past, but the events of Holy Week constitute the dynamic of our everyday lives. The call is to know that if we are not aware, not awake and conscious we will simply become a part of the angry mob. But if we are aware and awake we can enter into the difficult, painful, joyous and astounding reality of Holy Week as it repeated in the ordinary time of our everyday lives. We will learn to live in the present moment when the Paschal mystery is lived out in each of our lives.

A New Model of Politics

A couple of weeks ago we held an election here at the Monastery. But it was a very different type of election than most of people are used to. No money was spent on campaigns, there were no signs, no angry or even particularly stirring speeches and the election was over when everyone came to agreement and felt good about the process. In most elections in our country it frequently seems like the process brings out the worst in everyone but here at the monastery the process seems to bring out the best in us.

In our community the prioress is elected for a six year term and can be re-elected for another four years. Several months before the election the community begins to prepare through prayer. Every evening for at least a couple of months before the election a special prayer is said by the whole community asking for God’s grace and wisdom for the sister to be elected and for the whole community to be open to the movement of the Spirit.

The election process is formally opened in a ceremony in the chapel by the president of our federation, (a group of affiliated Benedictine monasteries that come together for mutual support and accountability.) This beginning reminds us that all decisions are rooted in prayer and the presence of God. The presence of the federation president and two sisters from other monasteries who will facilitate the election reminds us that we are part of a much greater whole, of all who live this Benedictine way of life.

The process begins with a review of the goals the community had already established in previous meetings. The process moves on to discussing the names of sisters who have gifts that may make them good leaders for the community. This discussion is done at tables, respectfully looking at the qualities of quite a few sisters and how they have gifts to serve the community. This is a process of affirmation, there is no debate about who is better, there is no discussion about why someone isn’t suited for leadership.

Out of a long list of names the sisters whose names have been mentioned most often are asked to prayerfully consider whether they would be willing to serve as prioress. This isn’t the same as asking her whether she wants to be prioress, but whether she can see herself serving in this role at this time. This small group of sisters is given time to think, reflect and pray about their decisions.
Those who are willing to serve are then invited to speak briefly about their leadership style, their gifts and limitations. The community members can then ask clarifying questions. The facilitators work with the sisters who are open to being elected and with the community so that the process is smooth, respectful and peaceful. After everyone has had a chance to speak and questions have been asked community members begin to vote. This process continues in silence until the community comes to “convergence” in selecting a particular sister.

In the final step everyone convenes in the chapel, where the process began, and a formal vote is taken. The process is again grounded in prayer, in the place that is the heart of the community, and chairs are arranged in a circle to symbolize the egalitarian nature of our life. Each sister who is mentally able is invited to submit a ballot. After the voting is finished everyone lines up to hug the newly elected prioress and to offer her their support in the days ahead.

In his Rule Benedict says that the leader should be someone elected on the basis of her “goodness of life and wisdom in teaching.” Desire for the job, ability to make grandiose promises and gifts of inflammatory rhetoric are not part of the qualifications. Being prioress is about the gift of service not the desire for power, it is a humble openness to listen, to help, to call others to be their best selves, for the community to be about the Reign of God. For the community it is a process of being open to see the gifts in one another and willingness to allow someone to exercise those gifts. Everyone in the community knows that in order for this process to work she must be her best self in order to serve as a leader or as one who supports the leader.

In a world where many people have no opportunity for any kind of choice in their governance and many others do not appreciate the choices they have perhaps the Benedictine way can be a model that calls us all to be our best selves as we serve others.