Humility Step 8

Three times each year we read through the Rule as a community; three times a year we read through everyone's favorite chapter: On Humility (RB 7).

Yesterday's eighth step reads as follows:
"The eighth step of humility is that a monk does only what is endorsed by the common rule of the monastery and the example set by his superiors. [my emphasis]"

Elsewhere in the Rule, Saint Benedict writes "This Rule is only a beginning of perfection [RB 73]." Indeed, any rule or law can only be a beginning. The law cannot make us righteous; on the other hand, we do not abolish the law by insisting that we go beyond it. Rather, "love fulfills the law," to use St. Paul's phrase.

Following the letter of the Rule can become self-justifiying. St. Bernard, in his Steps of Pride points out that the beginnings of pride come when we watch other brothers in order to compare ourselves--favorably--with their observance. Fr. Thomas Keating makes a similar observation in the opening chapters of Invitation to Love, where he relates his own experience as a novice of encountering someone who had more zeal for monastic observance.

In the eighth step of humility, we are bidden not merely to observe the rule in all its particulars--I mean to insist that this is necessary--but above the letter of the law is its spirit embodied by the seniors of the community, who understand that the Rule was written to serve monks; monks do not serve the Rule. This is much more difficult than it sounds because it requires us to engage in a relationship. Often times younger monks look critically at seniors, who seem on their judgment to have 'less zeal'. In fact, the zeal that the seniors have is often one that has been tempered and channeled by the demands of long term loving relationships. And so the Rule might get bent a bit, but this is the genius of Benedict's Rule: it bends but does not break, and, like a good abbot, adapts itself to all kinds of characters within the monastery.

Personal Transformation in Christ

[This is the text of my homily at the initiation of four new postulants this morning: Br. Luke Asbury, Br. Ezekiel Brennan, Br. Cassian Torchedlo and Br. Damian Quesada. Please remember them in your prayers as they begin the novitiate.]

If we ask St. Benedict why he has written his Rule, he responds, in Chapter 73, “ut hanc observantes in monasteriis aliquatenus vel honestatem morum aut inititum conversationis.” “That by observing it in monasteries, we can show that we have some degree of a worthy way of life and the beginnings of conversatio. As one who has not yet mastered even this "little rule for beginners," I speak to you as one novice to another. ‘Monastic formation’ is not something that we enter into for a time and then finish when we make vows. In fact, one of our vows is conversatio morum, a term used in the sentence I quoted above. We promise to continue being formed by God’s grace into the image and likeness of God after the pattern of Jesus Christ. And so, as the four of you enter today into the novitiate, bear some things in mind about what the novitiate is and is not.

First of all, we are not training you for an apostolate, at which point, you will receive certification and go off on mission. This is rather a testing period, to learn first of all more deeply the mysteries of God, kept and guarded in heaven for us; to learn more deeply God’s abiding love for you, and to discover his purposes for you. These purposes include coming to know Him as He truly is, but also coming to know yourself as loved by Him, as needing Him, and as sent to accomplish His task for you. This task, as I said above, is not an ‘apostolate’ in the current sense of the word, but we hope is simply to be a monk: to be called to a life hidden with Christ in God, interceding for the world, praising God day and night so as to bring about by the Holy Spirit the hidden Kingdom of God.

This testing period is again something that does not end with temporary profession. As all of us in vows can attest, the way to God is hard and rugged, and all of us with you have persevered through many crises, and in doing so, I believe, have come to a personal experience of God’s fidelity and salvation. The only way to persevere in these times is to do so by clinging to Jesus Christ, to know Him and to trust Him, to take His life within us as our strength.

This will come about by practicing the Incarnational spirituality of the monastic tradition, in imitation of Christ’s own trials and faith. To be conformed to Him, I suggest to you on today’s feast, will require that you meditate on His two natures: always holding them together without confusing them.

Pope John Paul II, in his exhortation Vita Consecrata, uses the Transfiguration as a central focus of religious life in the Church. We are called apart, as were Peter, John and James, to be with Christ alone, and we are called to a recognition of His divine majesty and splendor. Our constant praise and attentive celebration of the liturgy and our faithfulness to lectio divina will help us to see in Jesus Christ the love of the Creator God drawing near to us, ‘What we have seen with our own eyes and touched with our hands’. This vision of Christ’s glory and power will strengthen us to battle temptation, to endure trials, to carry our own Crosses next to Christ.

But in order to see and touch Him, we must also appreciate His human nature. On today’s feast day, we see two example of Christ Incarnate, showing us the disposition of faith with regard to God’s providence. First of all, we see Christ in the temple, listening to the rabbis and asking them questions. Why would God the Son need to learn from these teachers of the Jews? Could He not simply have learned all things in prayer with His Father? Perhaps. But in becoming man with us, in adopting our human nature, He shows us that our Christian lives are not abstracted from relations with our fellow human beings, and as novices, especially our teachers. Similarly, when we read that Jesus went up to Nazareth and was obedient to Mary and Joseph, we see the necessity of obedience to the human instruments God has placed in our lives. In Mary, we see a model of the Church as our Virgin Mother, who gives us birth and nourishes us daily. In Joseph, we see a model of our religious superiors and spiritual fathers, who guard us against dangerous errors in our own inclinations. This is not to say that the Holy Spirit does not speak to you directly; only that we cannot go wrong if we subject our thoughts to the discernment of the community that mediates God’s Incarnate presence to us.

Let us then take as our own the simplicity of the child Jesus, novices and advanced novices as we are, and with a pure trust in God’s promises, embark anew on the process of personal transformation by grace into bearers of God’s Holy Spirit, for our salvation and for the salvation of souls throughout the world.

On the Daily Manual Work, Part 4

Ideoque hac dispositione credimus utraque tempore ordinari: id est ut a Pascha usque kalendas Octobres a mane exeuntes prima usque hora paene quarta laborent quod necessarium fuerit.
And thus we believe that this arrangement should be followed regarding the times for each [i.e. manual work and reading]: from Easter until the first of October, going out after the first hour until just before the fourth, they will labor at whatever work is necessary. [RB 48: 2-3]

On aspect of the Rule which has been almost universally ruled out in today's world is the common method of telling time that was used before mechanical clocks were perfected. Benedict's day consisted of the daylight, divided into twelve hours. In summer, these hours were rather long. In southern Italy an hour would be something like 70 of our minutes each. Likewise, the hours of night in the height of summer would have been closer to 50 of our minutes. This would mean, among other things, that the time for sleep in summer would be barely seven hours, given the time alloted to Compline and Vigils, both prayed in the dark. On the other hand, even 'rising at the eighth hour of the night' [RB 8] in the winter, the monks would still manage to have a solid nine and a half to ten hours in which to sleep.

Benedict seems to expect that the brothers will be working outdoors, even if he feels obliged to give them some reason for doing this humble work (remember that a sun tan in his day was not a sign of wealth and leisure, but a sign of a 'blue-collar' laborer!). Midday in Italy is and was too hot for heavy work at midday, so the monks were to work in the cooler morning hours. The above schedule probably allows for work from about 6:00 a.m. until 9:30 a.m.

This sort of foresight is what gives Benedict such a good reputation. He is not interested in pushing his monks for all their worth. His army is not about 'boots on the ground' toughness but about the tough self-emptying that charity requires. The fantastic penances of the desert monks seem to cast Benedictines in a weaker light, and yet it is the Bendictines that have persevered while Egyptian-style monasticism has only made fleeting reappearances throughout history. In any case, St. Benedict is not interested in working for the sake of work. In this, I suggest that he has his precursor in the great Father of desert monsticism, Antony the Great. I close with two anecdotes about Antony's famous discretion.

Cassian writes of a meeting of abbas in which the various old monks gave opinions on which virtue is most important in monastic life. Different monks proposed vigils, fasting, hospitality, or solitude. And finally Antony spoke, "All the things you mentioned are indeed necessary....But...we often see that those who keep fasts and vigils most rigorously [etc]...are so suddenly deceived that they are unable to bring to a satisfactory conclusion the work that they have begun, and they cap off the highest fervor and a praiseworthy life with a disreputable end....For although the works of the aforesaid virtues abounded in them, the lack of discretion by itself did not permit those works to endure to the end." [Conferences 2:2.3-4--tr. Boniface Ramsey]

from the Apophthegmata:
"A hunter in the desert saw Abba Antony enjoying himself with the brethren and he was shocked. Wanting to show him that it was necessary sometimes to meet the needs of the brethren, the old man said to him, 'Put an arrow in your bow and shoot it.' So he did. The old man then said, 'Shoot another,' and he did so. Then the old man said, 'Shoot yet again,' and the hunter replied 'If I bend my bow so much I will break it.' Then the old man said to him, 'It is the same with the work of God. If we stretch the brethren beyond measure they will soon break. Sometimes it is necessary to come down to meet their needs.' When he heard these words the hunter was pierced by compunction and, greatly edified by the old man, he went away. As for the brethren, they went home strengthened." [Antony 13--tr. Benedicta Ward]

On the Daily Manual Work, Part 3

Ideo certis temporibus occupari debent fratres in labore manuum, certis iterum horis in lectione divina.
Therefore, at certain times, the brothers ought to be occupied in manual labor, and during the remaining hours, in lectio divina.
RB 48: 1

Thus, Saint Benedict legislates for three activities during the day: 1) The Opus Dei, the liturgy, the times of which have already been established earlier in the Rule; 2) 'manual labor'; 3) lectio divina, 'divine reading'

Elsewhere, St. Benedict allows for personal needs between Vigils and Lauds, and later in this chapter he admits the possibility of a midday nap. Later Benedictine tradition adds in other personal activities that we would not normally think of as work: practicing a musical instrument, light reading, flower gardening, and so on. I suspect that this falls under St. Benedict's heading of work, but I will wait until later in the chapter to discuss that. Finally, community recreation is a venerated part of most, if not all, monastic schedules. St. Benedict has an analogous time, during which the Conferences or other edifying reading is listened to by the brothers, but in any case, it is a non-liturgical informal gathering of the community before Compline.

What emerges is St. Benedict's famous balance and moderation. We will see that he affords a great amount of time for reading, and that manual labor is generally kept to a very merciful amount. It is also significant that St. Benedict deals with reading primarily in this chapter under the heading of work. While he has qualifying adjectives for the two other types of 'work': The work of God in the liturgy, and the manual work for physical exertion, we can probably extrapolate from these and see reading as another component of work.

Work requires exertion, and not infrequently lectio divina takes effort. We may prefer to read the Bible in snippets, culling the Good Book for our favorite passages, the things that comfort us. St. Benedict instructs his monks to read books 'entire and straight through' [RB 48: 15], not being 'daunted' and 'running away' [cf. Prol. 48] when we encounter sections that makee us squirm a bit. Reading is work. Understanding takes time and effort. But this is work of central importance to the monastic project. In the fields we must turn the soil of the ground in order to plant the seeds that will produce the food we eat. At lectio, we must turn the hardened ground of our hearts and minds so that the Sower Who sows the Word will find good soil there. Reading challenges us constantly to think differently with God's thoughts and not our own. Reading Scripture conditions us to see things from God's perspective and get out of our own small worlds. This is work of the highest order, and as we shall see, in this chapter it is of equal importance to the work of our hands.

On the Daily Manual Work, Part 2

Otiositas inimica est animae [RB 48: 1]
Idleness is the enemy of the soul.

Philosopher Josef Pieper's most famous work, 'Leisure, the Basis of Culture' was required reading when I attended the U of Chicago many years ago. In it, he draws a distinction between leisure and idleness. For Pieper, leisure is necessary for right action. In this he is proposing anew an idea as old as Aristotle. In my translation, I am reading this distinction back into Latin a bit. Romans were not overly fond of the idea of leisure during the golden and silver eras of literature. A pragmatic people, they tended to associate productive leisure with lazy idleness. Thus, Seneca found it necessary to defend the leisured life in his De otio. Monks have typically been advocates of otium divinum, the divine leisure that affords time for reading and prayer. Sunday, the Lord's Day, takes over the idea of rest and leisure from the Sabbath. Monks deliberately withdraw from worldly business, or 'negotiation' (nec-otium non-leisure), to be free for the things of God.

St. Benedict begins this chapter, however, with the word otiositas, a nominalization of the adjective otiosus, at rest, idle, unemployed. Perhaps we could say that 'unemployment is the enemy of the soul'. In any case, there is a sense in this word of idleness or laziness, a preference not to have to work. It is, as we say, the Devil's workshop. Not every monk is good at capitalizing on genuine otium. It can quickly degenerate into a space for the free play of all kinds of temptations: wandering outside the monastery, surfing the net, talking to others, etc. St. Benedict anticipates that leisure will stretch some monks even when offered only on Sunday. "If anyone is so remiss and indolent that he is unwilling or unable to read or study, he is to be given some work so as not to be idle (vacet)." [RB 48: 23]

How do we make use of our downtime? Do we compulsively fill it with 'make work' so as not to have to encounter ourselves or God? Do we systematically exclude it from our schedules? Does this harm our prayer? On the other hand, do we waste time on television, videos, internet, magazines, gossip and so forth? We will see throughout this chapter that a good, balanced lifestyle, with alternating times of prayer, work and leisure is part of St. Benedict's genius.

“Cut off from the worship of the divine, leisure becomes laziness and work inhuman.”
--Josef Pieper

On the Daily Manual Work, Part 1

Dear friends,
Last Lent, I wrote a more or less line-by-line commentary on Chapter 49 of the Rule, On the Observance of Lent. Response to this and my more recent commentary on the Ladder of Humility were quite positive, so I thought as part of my Lenten discipline this year, I would write another close commentary, this time on Chapter 48, "On the Daily Manual Work." I will do this concurrently with a second essay, a series of four talks for the monastic chapter this Lent, on "Suffering, Forgiveness and Reconciliation."

So let us begin where we ought, with the title of this chapter. This year I will give you the Latin and my translation first.

DE OPERA MANUUM COTIDIANA.

"On the daily manual work"

One of the Benedictines mottos is Ora et labora: Pray and work; or so it is usually translated. Let me point out here that the phrase is not Benedict's but is a nineteenth-century creation. In English, we are more accustomed to saying 'manual labor' than we are 'manual work'. St. Benedict has reversed these common connections. "Ora et labora" would be better translated, using English cognates, as "Pray/beseech/'orate' and labor" These are two distinct activities: imploring God and toiling physically. Women labor to give birth: it is an activity full of exertion, pain, fraught with the possibility of 'toiling in vain'. St. Benedict later uses the word labor with the distinctive unpleasant connotations I've pointed out. He says that if the brothers themselves have to do field work, monks should not therefore be saddened, but should take a kind of pride in the fact that the monastic Fathers of old as well as the Apostles, lived by the labore manuum suarum, 'the work of their own hands' (not someone else's!).

So why here does St. Benedict use the word opus instead ? Perhaps by giving you the word in its nominative form, I have hinted at the answer. First, what does Strunk and White's Latin dictionary have to say about opus versus labor? Opus also means work, but it carries with it more of a sense of accomplishment, delight, productivity, 'works' that outlast us. Beethoven was the first composer to label his 'works' as 'opera', as in the wonderful Opus 59 String Quartets. Opus also carries the sense of 'service', akin to the Hebrew avodah, the privileged temple work of the holy people of Israel, and especially the priests and Levites. From this sense, we get the phrase, common in Benedict, 'opus Dei' which describes the work of praising God in the oratory.

What St. Benedict has in mind, by using the phrase opus manuum rather than labor manuun, is undoubtedly the slow, untroubled, creative work that monasteries are famous for. This is not primarily meant to be back-breaking, but it might include the hard work of the harvest, of digging wells, clearing land, herding animals. But there also must be room for artisans: for writing icons, writing music, building choir stalls, baking cookies, installing lighting, copying and illuminating manuscripts, sewing, and so on. This is all 'manual work', and some of it takes genuine physical effort, but the primary thing is that it is not principally intellectual work. It is work that engages the body and the mind together, keeping both from otiositas, the idleness which is the enemy of the soul. The phrase also recalls for us that our primary work is praising God, not the work of our hands. The latter serves the former.

Where possible, this work should be accompanied by the continual meditative prayer prized by monks since the desert days in Egypt. In Egypt the preferred work was basket-weaving: it allowed the monk to listen to prayers being read or to pray quietly, meditating over Scripture while his hands produced handiwork to support his withdrawal from the world. Ideal monastic work is gentle, slow, contemplative; but as in so many things, monks must discern. We will see St. Benedict's own wisdom in action in many places in this chapter.

In our own lives, in which more and more people spend their 9 to 5 job at computers or in retail and service, do we make time for real operi manuum? How often I feel better after taking a walk, practicing piano, shoveling snow, baking bread, painting signs, and so on. Such simple work dispels sadness and anxiety, frees our minds from ruminating over the same old sob stories and often produces fruits that others can enjoy. Is there a small hobby that each of us has that can be turned into this type of healthy work? Can we learn to see our 'labor' as productive in this way as well? This is a serious challenge in our world right now.

Humility Step Eleven: Restraint of Speech

"The eleventh step of humility is that a monk speaks gently and without laughter, seriously and with becoming modesty, briefly and reasonably, but without raising his voice, as it is written: 'A wise man is known by his few words.' [RB 7: 60-61]

The commentator on this step risks looking foolish indeed. The experienced monk is aware of how problematic his own thoughts can be. One of the key works of the monk is the 'discernment of spirits', meaning the careful sifting of the inner impulses of mind and heart. So often we speak reactively, saying the first thing that comes to mind, without asking ourselves whether the thought has the force of reason, or whether it is subtly self-serving. Will what I say add to the discussion or merely reassert what everyone knows? Am I able to speak gently and seriously, without having to sugar-coat hostile or ambiguous words with a nervous smile and giggling? Or do I fear being overwhelmed by others' opinions and fear having to do someone else's will, and so assert my opinion with force? Do we ever really ask ourselves these questions? The humble among us do, and wind up reticent to speak with over-confidence. The humble realize how often we are misled by hidden passions, agendas and habits of mind. The humble are not afraid to defer to another's judgment. Would that we all attained this!

Humility Step Ten: Restraint of Laughter

"The tenth step of humility is that he is not given to ready laughter, for it is written: Only a fool raises his voice in laughter. [RB 7: 59]"

In Robert Heinlein's science fiction novel Stranger in a Strange Land, the main character, a child raised by aliens who has been returned to earth, makes the observation that human beings laugh because they are actually very sad and need to distract themselves from this fact. He is able to see this because while he is human, he did not grow up with human beings around him and never learned to laugh.

When I read this as an adolescent, I was somewhat offended by the idea. I like a good laugh as much as the next person. As I have aged, I have come to see something of Heinlein's point, though it is a bit overstated. Infants laugh or at least giggle out of sheer delight at an age where they probably can't remember whatever existential dread they experienced five minutes ago. Also, St. Benedict does not condemn all laughter. The humble monk can simply be identified by a lack of readiness to laugh. It is important to emphasize that we will not become humble by moping about all day and frowning like a beadle breaking up a card game (that is supposed to be funny).

St. Basil amusingly permits his monks to appreciate funny comments by a slight smile. He notes that Jesus is never said to have laughed, and that in the Old Testament, the only time God laughs is at His enemies.

How does it follow that a monk who is reluctant to laugh is therefore humble? If we reverse the syllogism and say that a monk who simply bursts out laughing at slight provocations is not so humble, we might begin by observing that laughter has a certain effect on others. In fact, any sound we make has an effect on others, and one of the functions of silence is to learn to appreciate things as they are and not to feel compelled to control them by immediately making comments or overwhelming them by eruptions of passion from inside ourselves. When we recognize the jitteriness that often produces laughter, we can begin to ask ourselves some tough questions. Do I laugh because I really think things are funny, or am I merely uncomfortable and want to relive tension by guffawing? I am genuinely paying attention to things, or merely reacting out of my own nervousness? If I am nervous, why? Am I worried about what others are thinking of me? If so, this obviously is not about humility but a type of vainglory.

Again, I don't believe that monks are meant to be humorless, and there are myriad examples of monastic goofiness. St. Bernard's meticulous treatise on beards comes to mind, as well as the Master's burlesque on the gyrovagues. The Desert Fathers surely could mingle dead seriousness with a light-hearted sense of the absurdity of human affairs. In fact, I am convinced that the Bible features all sorts of humor, much of which is lost in a concern to translate it with the solemn cadences of Shakespeare (usually without his genius). But the humor found in, say, the Book of Daniel (such as the sing-song repetition of the names 'Shadrach! Meshach! Abednago!') is not the sort to shock us into rolling on the ground in laughter, such as might be the aim of a Lenny Bruce routine. Rather, humor does seem to be related to sadness, perhaps not only as a distraction, but as a more proper response to the limits, contradictions and foibles of human experience.

Laughter, however, can be taken to various extremes. We should not end this step without noting that laughter is often at the expense not of our own weakness or foibles, but someone else's. When we see a group of adolescent males outside of a school laughing knowingly, most of us would assume that the humor is off-color. Because laughter can wound, senstive personalities will be cautious to understand what is being said before stamping it with the seal of approving laughter. A monk who has seen many struggling souls and who has lived through many hard times in the communal life will, if he does not become cynical, become peaceful and naturally slow to react with passion to anything, except Jesus Christ. Such a peace indicates a quiet acceptance of oneself and of others and an unwillingness to control others by either putting them down or bullying them with loud noise.

This is one of the most problematic verses in all of the Rule. Often, the most difficult verses are the ones that reveal the most about our own cultural blind spots. What does it say about us that we invest millions of dollars in getting laughs from comedians and movies and cannot find Iraq on a map?

Ladder of Humility Step Nine: Taciturnity

The ninth step of humility is that a monk controls his tongue and remains silent, not speaking unless asked a question, for Scripture warns, In a flood of words you will not avoid sinning, and, A talkative man goes about aimlessly on earth. [RB 7: 56-58]

Committing a thought to words brings the thought to bear on the real world, even changing reality subtly. I might think that a brother annoys me, but once I say it out loud, the thought obtains a potency to wound and disfigure my relationship with him. Why should my reactions and internal feelings mold others' worlds? And yet we do this subtly all the time, and not only by our words. Our gestures, frowns, smiles or lack of attention incarnate the movements of our hearts constantly. Even so, words possess a certain efficacy, being bearers of spiritual realities. How often do we unthinkingly let fly with whatever happens to be on our minds? How often does this happen simply because we cannot endure silence, aware in those moments of our human inadequacy and lacking the crutch of self-justification that constitutes so much idle talk?

I have found it of interest that in contemplative monasteries one of the first impressions a newcomer has, once he is deprived of his normal means of distracting himself by chattering, is that others are watching him. He cannot ward off others' eyes (at least he feels this to be so) by striking first, controlling the exchange by saying something. It takes real humility and ease with oneself and one's lowliness simply to be as we are and let others think what they will without trying to sway them one way or another. When we cannot set the terms of others' opinions, we assume that they are judging us, or at least that we are at a disadvantage. When we disavow needless speech, we give up the right to 'spin' our self-presentation. We give people what we are and not what we claim to be.

In Dostoevsky's 'Grand Inquisitor', Jesus Christ remains completely silent while the Inquisitor goes on and on at length, admitting that he and what he stands for are a complete fraud. Jesus Christ, the Word and the Truth is also He Who Is. We do well to trustingly imitate Him, so as to enter reality more deeply. Our thoughts are not His; let us not by careless speech obscure His salvific thoughts by committing ourselves to our own fallen ones.

Humility Step Eight: Not Standing Out

"Organisations that do not innovate effectively may be destroyed by those that do." So reads the Wikipedia entry on 'innovation', and while occasionally one finds reference to the destructive effects of some innovation, generally speaking, the willingness to try something new is viewed as an unalloyed positive in our culture.

Monastic culture is part of a wisdom tradition. In such a tradition, there are often aspects that one can learn only by experience and imitation of the masters. Put more humbly, in any particular Benedictine community, there will be a variety of customs, many of them seemingly nitpicking: when to bow, how to close doors, how to pass food at the table, what color socks you can wear, and so forth. The eighth step of humility means honoring the wisdom hidden in these rules and in the behavior of the seniors of the community, trusting that they will transform us.

So often, men entering the monastery have been trained to look for the quickest way to mop a floor, or the most convenient way to fold clothes, or the 'most logical' way to organize a tool shed. But charity is not quick, convenient or ultimately logical. Charity requires seeking the good of another, and the monastery customs, we trust, are meant to be expressions of fraternal charity. When a novice tries to do things 'better', he usually doesn't realize that such behavior effectively calls into question the painstaking experience of the seniors, who have instituted the rules as a means of bonding the community. Innovation risks devaluing or even demolishing the symbolic actions we use to show our good will and love toward one another. On the other hand, humble acceptance of behavioral norms demonstrates a desire to be one of the group.

Frequently, I receive emails from high school students whose world history class has just reached the Middle Ages and whose teacher requires them to do a report on monasteries. This year, two precocious young men wrote a series of questions to me, one of which was something along the lines of "do you ever find it hard to live under all those rules?" To which I replied: If you go out for the football team, you will have to agree to abide by all kinds of rules. If you want to be a good teammate, you will observe them. For the sake of the goals of the organization (which in this case, you accept voluntarity), the team player accepts the fact that he must stay away from drinking parties, get enough sleep, and not do dangerous stunts to impress the girls. The rules are an expression of what it takes to be a team.

It strikes me as quite surprising that this step is the eighth, further up the ladder than what seem to be more difficult rungs, such as obedience under difficult or unjust situations. What I suppose this to mean is that while we can make a good show of bonhomie by following rules, it takes time and effort to learn to observe what seniors actually do when it is not written down. Learning to observe things objectively requires us to put aside our preconceived notions about what is important to see, and this requires the undoing of our ego, which tends to impose order on things rather than receive it.

Humility Step Seven: Self-Conviction

I made jesting reference in my homily yesterday morning, in the context of St. Benedict's Seventh Step of Humility, to the fear that modern monks have that accepting myself as lower than others will harm our self-esteem. The very idea of the 'self-esteem of monks' seems totally unworthy of the company of the great Abbas and Ammas of our tradition. Can I really stand beside Abba Arsenius or Abba Antony or Abba Paphnutius and say, "I would have liked to grow more in humility and holiness, but I feared losing my self-esteem?"

This is not to say that our experience of 'low self-esteem' is to be entirely discounted, only that we clearly have something to learn from an encounter with the monastic tradition, and that this lesson is not about how to improve self-esteem, but how that's the wrong category with which to approach the spiritual life. If we recall that our goal is union with God, a relationship of friendship and love, it seems awkward to fit esteem in there. If we enter into a relationship with someone because we expect that person to help us appreciate ourselves more, well, that might be valid with a counselor or teacher, but not with a lover.

Back to St. Benedict: if we turn his injunction around and look at its converse, I doubt many of us would have a problem with it. If we consider ourselves better than even one person, then we have not yet put on the mind of Christ, who became the lowest of all, who gave up His life for all. As long as there is someone out there who I am convinced is less important than I am, I will be willing to let him go first: "That sheep there is not worth saving!" we say, albeit indirectly, to the Good Shepherd as He sets off after the stray.

And the truth about pride is such that if we give ourselves that little opening ("I'm gracious toward most people, and after all, that guy really has it coming!"), we will ultimately slide into self-centeredness.

In a democracy, pride often masks itself as humility and simplicity. "I'm just one of the simple people, not some fancy-pants Senator like her!" "Yes, he's got a PhD, but how important is all that stuff anyway?" "She plays the violin really well, but in the end, what good were all those hours spent practicing?" We play out this game in the media all the time, setting up actresses and politicians, and then when they make a misstep: gotcha! We get the smug prize of at least not having made a public mess of our lives. In our present situation, it is so easy to give ourselves a pass when we make these sorts of comments. St. Benedict teaches us that we will not achieve 'the love that casts out fear' so long as we make these comparisons favorable for ourselves.

Humility Step Six: Willing to Be Weak

There is a strain in contemporary Catholic and Christian apologetics that argues that we should all support Christianity because it has given so much to society. Books with titles like "Triumph: The Power and the Glory of the Catholic Church," and "How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization" have proven quite popular in recent times. The idea that our Faith is something good for cultures and for the world I do not dispute; the problem comes in more when this bleeds into a stance that judges the value of the Church by its contribution to somethig presumably more important. The Church becomes merely an instrument toward some goal other than the Kingdom of God, which is not of this world. This accompanies a subtle shifting towards the modern idea of 'religion' in which everyone gets to examine different faiths and choose which one best suits their needs, rather than as a call from the Living God to a life of service and witness. "Woe to me if I do not preach the gospel," sounds like compulsion, not a few choice among the options available to me.

Another problem with the approach is that it tends to present Christians (and particularly Catholics) as ultra-competent. "We produce the best philosophers, economists, doctors, scientists, businessmen, athletes...you name it!" Priests are supposed to be versions of Bing Crosby, Fr. Brown (sleuth), St. Thomas Aquinas and St. John Bosco rolled into one. Seminary ought to train priests to be psychiastrists, building managers, and friends (but also squeeze doctrine in there some place). The pressure is by no means limited to priests, but I speak from my own point of view. In any case, the idea is that if we are to maintain our reputation as absolutely central to , then we must be on top of our game at all times, no matter the challenges.

How different is St. Benedict's Sixth Step of Humility. Are we ready to regard ourselves as "poor and worthless workmen?" Should we not rather take pride in what we do?

Again, in understanding this properly, it is of utmost importance to hear what Cassian has to say in his version of the ladder of humility: "Humility...is verfied by the following indications:....if he is satisfied with utter simplicity and, as being an unfit laborer, considers himself unworthy of everything that is offered him." In other words, doing shoddy work won't make someone humble at all. In fact humility will come about more naturally if we do our best and find that our blood, sweat and tears doesn't draw much attention or praise. Nothing generates the inner conviction of worthlessness than genuine, and perhaps brazenly public, failure.

But worthless in whose eyes? The gist of Cassian's aim in his teaching on humility is contempt for the world, meaning, I suggest worldliness and worldly values. Here we see the divergence between an attitude that would see our faith as contributing to some worldly goal (building Western Civilization...hmmph!) as opposed to seeking the Kingdom of God. This seeking of God's kingdom does not mean that we will not enjoy some level of success in the world, only that we will come to realize that we didn't 'build the city of God', God did! "Seek first the Kingdom of God and His righteousness and all things will be given to you as well." If we choose God's way over the world's way, we are bound to appear foolish at times, perhaps often (what the heck do you monks do all day, anyway?). We will also be led by God's mysterious tutelage, to understand how dependent we are on Him, and how generous and faithful He is to us. When we have grasped this fully, we won't hesitate to say that our contribution was little to nothing. We are simple workmen in God's vineyard, to quote another Benedict.

Humility Step Five: Exomologesis

Step five in St. Benedict's ladder has deep roots in the third and fourth century monastic movements. The practice of manifesting one's thoughts to another human being is one of the hallmarks of monastic spirituality. It presupposes, first of all, a strong relationship of trust with a spiritual elder. This elder need not be old, per se, and indeed Cassian notes that there are hoary men who lack the discretion needed to be a spiritual guide.

Today, this practice is very often confused with sacramental confession. In the sacrament, the emphasis is on sin and forgiveness, whereas in the monastic practice, called exomologesis, the emphasis is on discernment. The novice is presumably unskilled in determining the provenance of any particular thought. Satan can disguise himself as an angel of light, and so not even every 'good' thought is worth entertaining. Likewise, as we noted in Step Two in the Ladder of Humility, most of us are unskilled at finding the proper balance for the satisfaction of our bodily needs. Someone on fire for fasting might actually exceed the proper measure and fall into sin.

Thoughts always have more power over us when they worm themselves deep into our brain where we cannot inspect them. The mere fact of saying aloud what one is thinking and being open to having it judged causes the thought to lose this power. Note the important circumstances in which I place this manifestation of thoughts: if we utter a thought in anger, with the intention of 'making it stick' (for example, when we yell at the waiter for messing up our order, because we are convinced he had it coming), then not only is there no chance for discernment and conversion, but we actually cement the thought in our minds by willingly associating it with a powerful emotion.

It is worth dwelling for a paragraph on this linking of thoughts and emotion. St. Benedict says that we should confess sinful thoughts humbly. I think what he means by this is that we should not let a clear confession become clouded by fear, sadness, anger, regret, and so on. These are not the same as contrition proper. Sadness, for example, might actually demonstrate pride: "I can't believe that I...I! could do such a thing (someone else, yes!)!" How often do we get angry with ourselves and say, "I can't believe that I keep committing this same fault!" or indignantly judge our actions before we confess them, "Yes, I gossip, but I'm not as bad as so-and-so! No one is bleeding!" Simply narrating our thoughts, sinful or not, before another human being severs the link between the thought and the corresponding emotion, and thus frees us to inspect the thought rationally.

St. Benedict stands somewhere between classic exomologesis and sacramental confession, in that he too emphasizes "sinful" thoughts. However, we must always bear in mind that he expects his monks to read Cassian and Basil, in which the more neutral practice is more explicit. In a Rule 'for beginners' [RB 73: 8], it is probable that analysis and confession of sin makes more sense. We will tend to be tempted more by false thoughts of good works after we have made some advancement in the spiritual life. Most of us have enough to do to pay attention to the temptations to more or less obvious sins, and it is this that St. Benedict wants to see. The person who understands his or her solidarity with others in temptation and sin will humbly admit whatever wrong he or she has done, given a humble and trustworthy listener.

Humility Step Four: Embracing Suffering

There is no use trying to sugar-coat the fourth step of humility. We will let St. Benedict himself deliver the goods:

"The fourth step of humility is that in this obedience under difficult, unfavorable, or even unjust conditions, his heart quietly embraces suffering and endures it without weakening or seeking escape."

The fact that this is extremely difficult is proved by the fact that St. Benedict appends no fewer than eight Scriptural quotations to fend off any complaints. That is to say that a Christian cannot grasp this embrace of suffering in the midst of injustice without faith and without revelation. In the United States, we are inclined to speak out against injustice; the very idea of (peaceful) protest is enshrined in our laws and our cultural myths. Jesus Christ followed a different path, and this is why we should listen carefully when He says, "When someone forces you to go one mile, go with him two."

What does this gospel teaching have to do with humility? Our usual response to injustice (especially when we are on the receiving end of it) is to become angry and fight against it. This is not necessarily the wrong response from a purely human perspective. I have written elsewhere, however, that Christian humility is a virtue normally hidden from the view of secular moral philosophers. If the elimination of injustice and evil is dependent on human beings, then quietly embracing suffering appears as a vice.

It is quite possible, however, that human beings are simply incapable of rooting out evil. The humble person grows aware of this possibility in his or her own struggle against vice. It is arduous work fighting the vices of one's own behavior: how can we possibly believe that we have the solutions to others' vices? That complaining about someone's unjust request will somehow bring about his or her immediate conversion when our own conversions come reluctantly and painstakingly? This is not meant to sound despairing, only to provoke us into a new region of awareness, in which God has the principal role to play in fighting evil. Once we come to realize that it is by grace that we are cleansed from sin and strengthened in virtue, we will learn not to rely on our own pluck and wit, and to trust God. This will also issue forth in a new attitude that refrains from judging others' actions too quickly, out of a humble desire to be consistent in our own words and actions.

We should end this reflection by noting that in the Rule, this injustice and suffering takes place in the monastery and under obedience to a legitimate superior. Thus, this is not a blanket exhortation to 'toe the line' with regard to secular authority, though Christians are encouraged to respect legitimate authority in that arena as well. Persons in authority have a responsibility to oppose injustice and set up the best approximation for justice in this world. They also have a duty to listen to the needs and concerns of their subjects. I would suggest that the legitimate authority that most of us possess in the political world is fairly minimal, but the ideology behind representative democracy sometimes makes us feel as if we should have an opinion on everything and express it. By contrast, when Jesus was asked to arbitrate between two brothers, He refused. When He was unjustly arrested, flogged, mocked and accused, He said virtually nothing except in a private audience with Pilate. He acted thus out of trust in the promise of vindication offered by His loving Father, and paradoxically, His trusting, silent, obedient embrace of suffering has merited for Him "all authority...in heaven and on earth."

Humility Step Three: Consenting to Authority

"I have observed the demon of vainglory being chased by nearly all the other demons, and when his pursuers fell, shamelessly he drew near and unfolded a long list of his virtues."
Evagrius of Pontus, Praktikos 31*

"Our seventh struggle is against the spirit of kenodoxia, which we can refer to as vain or empty glory....It strikes the monk...in such a way that persons who could not be deceived by carnal vices are all the more brutally hurt as a result of their spiritual successes."
St. John Cassian, Institutes 11.I-II**

We saw, in the second step of humility, that we need to embark on a program of asceticism in order to curb our lawful desires and allow grace to reorder them to their proper ends. We must love not the satisfaction of our desires, but seek rather to do a will other than our own. From the perspective of theology, it is God's will that we seek, but how exactly do we know what God's will is? Is it God's will that I stay up all night in vigil? That I begin to volunteer at a soup kitchen? That I enter the cloister? That I become a priest? That I marry the person who is quiet and good and not the one who is attractice and exciting? When we come up against these questions of discernment, the astute follower of Christ will become aware of how easily we fool ourselves and under guise of piety, choose subtly to do our own will, to trust our own judgment. Such is the affliction of vainglory alluded to in the tradition by Evagrius and Cassian above. Even when we are able to discern God's will 'to a T', if we are aware of having accomplished this, then we have gained nothing in humility, which is after all the goal.

The monastic safeguard against this trap is submission to an elder or an abba. In the Rule of St. Benedict, this role is played principally by the abbot. This dynamic accounts for the fondness of the early monks for recounting fabulous stories of obedience. These accounts, some of them quite shocking, are not meant to enforce a kind of hierarchy in the monastery, but are meant to liberate the monk from the hidden tendency to choose what 'seems right' or in modern terms 'feels right'. "There is a way which seems right to a man, but its end is the way to death [Prv. 16:25]." Turning over one's will to another in faith ensures that will we be forced to do things against our will.

This sounds quite frightening to the existential mindset that sees our identity precisely in the freedom to 'invent ourselves' and make our own choices. Does this not turn us into non-persons? Quite the opposite, in fact, but only if this is done in the context of faith. This is not a call to follow all authority blindly, least of all secular authority.

Let me give an example from singing. Most of us grow up singing by feel. A few very talented people can sing well without any training at all. Most of us need a little help because the voice is an extremely complex mechanism. Someone who tries to sing like Janis Joplin or even like Maria Callas without any training at all risks serious damage to her voice. When a person comes to a voice teacher, the first things that needs to happen is that the student must be forced to 'unlearn' everything she thinks she knows about singing. Sometimes, this literally requires a teacher to grab hold of someone's throat and move it around; there are two reasons for this, both related to the analogy of obedience. First of all, many of the muscles we use to sing are involuntary. We can't control them consciously. We need to adjust them indirectly, but we can't really know what that feels like unless some outside force moves the muscle to the place where it is supposed to be. Once it is there, we can learn how to reproduce the sensation. Secondly, sometimes habits are so ingrained that we simply cannot break the tension of a muscle group without intervention and manipulation from outside. We might not even be aware that we are constricting this muslce group until we feel the freedom of having this tension broken by someone else (if you have ever had a good massage, you know what this is like).

In the spiritual life, we are so frequently unaware of our blind spots. A superior does not need to be all-knowing in order to confront those blind spots; he needs only to be obeyed. Sooner or later, something will be asked that is utterly contrary to our way of doing things. How much broader is our repertoire of reponses to life if we learn to act in ways completely outside of our own judgment and resources! Similarly, often times certain habitual sins can only be broken by being forced to do something other than what we normally do to cope. Frequently a habitual sin is one that we aren't really ready to give up. So we choose 'remedies' that actually reinforce the problematic behavior. The alcoholic can profess the intention of not drinking any more, but if other habits in his or her life don't change, familiar situations will set off the triggers for 'just having one'. In the spritual life, we reach impasses precisely because the solution is outside our knowledge and awareness. Giving ourselves over to the instruction of another human being, chosen by God for this task, can often supply us with an unexpected (probably on some level unwanted!) perspective that later turns out to be the key to growth.

Finally, to return to the opening point: if we are able to fix all of our own problems, then we have little chance of becoming humble. As soon as we feel that we have vanquished all of our vices, we have fallen prey to vainglory and pride. This is not the way forward!


* Translated by John Eudes Bamberger OCSO

**Translated by Boniface Ramsey, OP

Humility Step Two: Doing the Father's Will

St. Benedict quotes our Lord in John 6:38, "I have come not to do my own will, but the will of him who sent me." He ties this is to a renunciation of self-will and the pleasure that comes from satisfying our own desires. In an older language, we would speak of the necessity of mortification in the spiritual life. Our desires in themselves are not bad: hunger and thirst are beneficial in that they allow us to care for our bodies properly. Sexual attraction makes pleasurable the continuance of the human race and the sacrifices that come with family life. Anger gives us the energy to resist evil, and sadness helps us to be converted from sin. But any of these desires can become an end in itself. Instead of taking care of ourselves, our spouses and children and caring for the community, we turn our desires selfishly inwards. We no longer see our bodies in their 'nuptial meaning' (to use John Paul II's wonderful phrase), and see instead a distorted version of ourselves as living only for ourselves.

Today, this distortion (which the scholastics called 'concupiscence') is in part the result of a strange and faulty philosophy that grows out of the upheavals of early modernity. Instead of rooting the theory of the person in culture and community, early modern and Enlightenment thinkers such as Hobbes and Rousseau began with the theory of the person as an individual with inherent individual rights. These rights are then bartered with other individuals so that ultimately 'enlightened self-interest' binds community by a 'social contract'. We cease to see ourselves as embedded in culture and we fail to see relationships as 'givens'; instead relationships are 'choices'. The governing rule is to seek to satisfy our desires to the best we can without offending others.

In this problematic arrangement, marriage becomes a contract in which, for example, men agree to give up freedom in exchange for (lawful) sexual pleasure. This idea is very prevalent in the media.

Rising bread dough needs to be punched down once or twice. This is not because the rising is bad, but because if the leavening action is not directed, it will go beyond what is a helpful rise, the bread will collapse, and the person eating the bread will not enjoy it. Similarly, hedges need trimming and pruning, not simply because they look better that way, but in fact they will live longer and have stronger roots and branches if we cut away the unproductive growth. Similarly with human desire: sometimes to find the correct mean and direction of a desire, we need to cut it back. The person who allows desire to run away with his life might not feel himself 'proud', but behind unchecked desire lurk self-will and rationalizations such as "My life is tough; I should be able to have an extra beer each night;" "Some people are able to control what they look at, but after all, they are dull; I might not be chaste, but at least I'm living!" These sorts of rationalizations put our desires at the center of our decision-making processes rather than putting others' needs and reasoning at the center. Seeeking humbly to follow God's law and realizing that we are made for others will open a space in our lives for learning to discipline our desires toward a higher goal. Putting ourselves at the service of others will naturally combat our sense of self-importance.

P.S. Did I write something in the last post that sounded like an apology for possible heresy? I don't quite understand the two comments that came in...though I do appreciate that people take the time to respond! Thanks.

Humility Step One: Living in God's Presence

In my introduction to St. Benedict's Ladder of Humility, I mentioned that this chapter is primarily a descriptive diagnostic tool. Thus, when St. Benedict writes, "The first step of humility, then, is that a monk, placing the fear of God always before his eyes, flees all forgetfulness," we should ask ourselves whether we do this. For most of us, the answer will be 'no'. The question, as I've set it up, is this: "If we can't accomplish this mindfulness by human effort, then what exactly are we supposed to learn from this teaching?"

First of all, we should in fact strive to keep the fear of God before our eyes. This means in particular, not simply giving in to sin and then saying, "Well, I can't help it; I'm pretty good in other areas, so God will give me a pass here." This would indicate selective forgetfulness. However, in insisting that we also cannot simply will ourselves into mindfulness, I mean to emphasize that God is merciful and forgiving, and therefore we should not act as did Adam and Eve and hide when we screw up. If we find that we are mired in a particular sin and cannot extricate ourselves, this is an invitation to humility; we must seek help: from God, from the prayers and advice of others, from mortification. If, on our own, we could place the fear of God before our eyes, we probably would not be doing that at all, but instead placing some kind of idol before our eyes, a false god who tells us that we are capable of saving ourselves by being good.

The forgetfulness that St. Benedict is concerned with avoiding is not remedied by imagining God as the Bad Cop, following us around and pointing out our faults. Rather, it involves a deliberate choice to hear God's life-giving Word and God's commandments and conform our lives to them. This can only be done by taking time to become familiar with God's commands, or in many cases, to re-familiarize ourselves with them. We are apt to forget, for example, that Jesus says over and over again, "Do not be afraid. I AM." We are apt to forget just how merciful our Savior is, and by reading John 4 or Luke 6 or the parable of the Prodigal Son, we call to mind just how true it is that God is Love and that the Word of God came into the world to save sinners and not the righteous. These words should roll off of our tongues--they are so full of joy and hope!

But we live in hectic times and so often I hear it said, "I try to pray, but I just don't have time." I submit that St. Benedict's first step addresses this concern. Is everything that we do in our busy lives totally necessary, or are there places where we 'make work' in order to feel important or needed? "I intend to remember God...tomorrow!" Are we afraid of what we will encounter when we sit face to face with God and bare our souls? "Be not afraid!" Just as we create false gods out of our experiences of abusive authority, we create false selves out of expectations, both our own and others'. The essence of pride is to attempt to create a self other than what we are. Humility comes with accepting ourselves, warts and all, and trusting God's grace to fashion us into the persons He intends us to be, rather than the persons we might think we prefer to be. God's plans for us are infinitely greater than what we can dream up. Trust Him!

The Ladder of Humility, Introduction

Each morning in the monastery, we read a brief portion of the Rule of St. Benedict, and because the Rule itself is merely 'a little rule for beginners', we read through it this way three times each year. We are about to complete the longest chapter, the seventh on humility. As it happens, I have recently received a few questions about this chapter, which tends to trouble many people today. Given its centrality in Benedictine spirituality, it seems that some words of assistance would be worthwhile.

First, let us note that humility is no tougher for us today than it has ever been. Aristotle famously did not consider it a virtue. Modern thinkers such as Rousseau and Nietzsche who urged healthy self-love were in a sense returning to a more 'sensible' paganism. Humility only makes sense if we believe in a loving, forgiving and All-powerful God. Jesus Christ, meek and humble of heart, triumphed through humility because He entrusted His life to God the Father. It is therefore faith that makes humility feasible.

Secondly, the ladder of humility is primarily descriptive and not prescriptive. This is to say that it is not a textbook for how to become humble. Rather, we can evaluate our progress (or lack thereof) by measuring ourselves against the ladder. This is also to say that we cannot conclude that a monk who never laughs is therefore humble. Rather, the humble monk will be less likely to bust out chuckling at every provocation.

This is not to say attempts at imitating the steps will not aid us in progressing. Certainly being aware of God's presence (step 1) is something that takes effort. Meditation on others' virtues and our faults is suggested in various ways by later saints such as Ignatius of Loyola, and this can lead us to the conviction that we are of less account than others (step 7). More normally, however, we will progress in humility the old-fashioned way, by gracefully accepting the humiliations that come with everyday life (St. Benedict mentions humiliations in connection with aspirants to the life: they ought to have 'zeal for humiliations'!). This can get easier with age: as our bodies stop cooperating and our hair falls out. As we grow in experience and gradually come to grips with the vagaries of life, our youthful certainties tend to be replaced with a quiet reticence to judge and take sides. These are at least opportunities to grow in humility; it is all too easy to resist them. The ladder of humility helps keep us honest.

Finally, honesty is simply the adjunct of humility. Humility is the product of seeing ourselves as we really are. We are at once incorrigible sinners and forgiven by a loving God. We are at once the crown of creation and God's adversaries. We possess amazingly powerful minds and frail bodies. This unstinting drive for truth is again possible because we believe that it is the Truth Who sets us free. Our fearful or proud efforts to avoid the truth ultimately lessen us, ironically, since it would appear that humility does this. This is perhaps why the ladder of humility is an ascent.

Provincial Chapter, Part 1

I have returned recently from participation in my first Provincial Chapter as superior. For several years, I have wondered if Benedictine values would not be of some assistance in a reassessment of ecclesiology, as re-envisioned by Vatican II, with its emphasis on subsidiarity and participation of the laity. I was surprised to have my intuition corroborated by a remark coming from Abbot Leo Ryska, former abbot of Benet Lake in Wisconsin, who basically asked the same question.

What do I mean by this? Beginning with the reforms of Charlemagne and St. Benedict of Aniane (late 8th century), the monasteries of Europe began to be more and more consolidated under one supreme authority. Before that, monasteries more or less had independent existences. St. Benedict of Nursia, in his Rule, envisions monasteries over far-flung areas, but they seem to be more under the supervision of the local bishop and even the local church in general, at least in the case that an abbot becomes unequal to his task when internal disputes are harming the community. There is no recourse to Rome or to a superior-general of some kind to intervene. However, with Charlemagne's push for stability and uniformity in church discipline throughout his short-lived empire, monasteries began to be more dependent on one another, more accountable to one another.

There is much good in such an arrangement. Monasteries can profit a great deal from healthy fraternal bonds with other houses, as I have repeatedly found. However, with the advent of the gigantic community of Cluny in the 10th century, healthy fraternal relations gave way to dependency (here I mean this in the canonical sense and not the psychological). More and more houses looked to be dependent on the 'mother house', and the abbot of Cluny became the abbot of the whole congregation, which begins to resemble more and more an 'order' in the sense we understand it in the modern world.

Citeaux, founding house of the Cistercians, took this to a new level, instituting 'visitations' in which monks from the mother house would have the authority to implement decisions in a foundation house. Now again, I mean no particular criticism in simply recounting this history. There were very good reasons for this move toward centralization. However, in the Rule of St. Benedict, it is clear that the local abbot is meant to have final authority in community, with the consultation of the local chapter (that is, the monks in the community who have made vows). Centralization weakens the local abbot and kicks authority farther and farther up the scale and away from the local situation. It is noteworthy that these developments are parallel with the centralizing forces that gave rise to the super-power papacy of the 12th century. Innocent III is usually cited as being the supreme example of this sort of governance.

It is in the twelfth century that the true 'religious orders' are born, with the arrival of St. Francis and St. Dominic. Rome had by this time concentrated the authority to grant to individual movements the faculty of starting a new style of religious life. When St. Francis first went to Rome to ask permission to found an order, he was more or less told to join the Benedictines or the Cistercians. He explained that what he was looking for was the permission to preach outside the monastery, saying that the monks were already taking care of the important work of the Divine Office; now we needed activism in the burgeoning cities of Europe. So the idea of apostolic orders was born.

The Jesuits represent in some ways the height of this development, with an all-powerful Superior General in Rome, with direct jurisdiction over any member of the Society anywhere int he world at any time. True, he delegates this authority in most instances, but in theory and not infrequently in fact, the head of the Jesuits could act directly when he chose to (I put this in the past tense because the situation today, which canonically more or less the same, has been deeply affected by modern currents of subsidiarity).

The Benedictines during this development were pushed more and more into the background, but had throughout the benefit of a Rule written hundreds of years before the ideas of centralization had any meaning whatsoever. After the plundering of the monasteries during the Reformation and then during the French Revolution, slowly the Benedictines started to make a comeback. Always very close to the ressourcement movement because of the injunction of the Rule to read the approved Catholic Fathers, and also very involved in the liturgical movement because of the circumscribed position of priests in the Rule of St. Benedict, black Benedictines began to raise important questions about the structure of the order (since Leo XIII, we have had to become an actual Order of St. Benedict, even though we generally resist the name, as I will explain) which in turn raised questions about what was seen to be the clericalization and over-centralization of the Church itself. While the Church has officially addressed these questions in the documents of Vatican II, especially in Lumen Gentium, implementing them has been a different story.

This is not surprise. When I try to explain the structure of the 'Benedictine Order', people tend to look at me funny. The arrangement could almost be seen to be that the higher up you get in the hierarchy of the Benedictines, the less authority you actually have. So over the entire 'Confederation' (our preferred name, rather than 'Order'), we have an Abbot Primate, Notker Wolf of St. Ottilien's in Germany, who has almost no authority, save for moral authority. He is the rector of our school in Rome, but beside that, his main duty is to provide for fraternal relations between houses, which he does quite well, I should add.

Below this global Confederation are the individual 'Congregations', which are usually national in origin. In the United States, we have two large Congregations reflecting not only an American identity, but a German and a Swiss inheritance. These are the American Cassinese and Swiss American Congregations. The Congregation to which my house belongs throws a wrench into this neat set-up. The Subiaco Congregation began as an Italian reform movement, but quickly became international.

In any case, in most Congregations, the ruling authority is not an abbot but the General Chapter. This is usually an assembly of abbots and delegates who are non-superiors (in theory, the lowest ranking monk in a monastery could be elected a delegate). However, the authority they have is again highly circumscribed by the Constitutions of each Congregation. These Constitutions generally aim at keeping the authority of the local abbot primary in his own community, but resolving questions of houses working together or serious problems of discipline in an individual community. The General Chapter can only meet every so often, and so itself is not an effective governing body for the crises that do occur, and so it elects an Abbot President to act in its stead--usually only provisionally until the next Chapter meeting.

Our Congregation is large enough (about 60 houses worldwide), that we are divided into nine Provinces. The structure of the Province parallels that of the Congregation as a whole, being ruled primarily by the Provincial Chapter, which elects an 'Abbot Visitor' to act in its stead when not in session. When therefore, I write that I have just returned from Provincial Chapter, this means that the highest authority in our English Province has just been convoked. Most matters we were able to settle to what seemed to be the satisfaction of all the local superiors. In one instance, there is a serious question of the interpretation of our Constitutions, that can only be solved at the higher level of the General Chapter, which will meet next September.

However important that all sounds, being home now I can say that what was decided at the Chapter has little or no immediate effect on our house. Here, our own local chapter and the Prior have the authority day-to-day.

In the Church today, we have moved a far distance from the regal papacy of Innocent III, but there is still a certain amount of fear that either a lack of a strong papacy will cause degeneracy at the local level (hence the loud complaints about local bishops when people don't like what they say) or that the papacy and indeed the hierarchy in toto is too controlling and centralized to respond to the need for action 'on the ground'. In between a full monarchy and a full democracy is the possibility of subsidiarity. This arrangement requires real trust, brotherly openness and finally faith in the Holy Spirit's guidance. This takes courage and patience. Where it will all end up is the Lord's call, but again, I propose that the structure of the Benedictine Confederation be examined. Personally, I think it works very well at all levels, but perhaps it does so precisely because each individual monk is striving to be imbued with the spirit of the Holy Rule, Holy Scripture, the Liturgy and the Fathers in such a way that we can assume a commonality of aims and likeness of worldview (a generally broad worldview, I think). Would something like this be possible for the Church as a whole?

St. Benedict on Lent, Part 14 (Conclusion)

"Therefore, everything must be done with the Abbot's will." RB 49: 10

In preparing for a recent talk at the University of Chicago's Lumen Christi Institute, I was really struck by the absolute authority given to the abbot in the Rule of St. Benedict. Perhaps just as striking is the fact that despite the fact that the abbot has the final say over virtually anything a brother does, Benedict never falls into the Manichean paranoia that haunts the Rule of the Master, the immediate source for Benedict's own teaching. This raises the question: can we really put such trust in a man?

John Cassian wrestles with this question at various points of the Conferences, admitting that 'grey hairs' don't automatically qualify one as an Abba. Rather, the distinguishing mark of the true Abba is sanctity. The Abbot therefore is not the one who is the most competent, though God's house should be administered by trustworthy men; nor is he the most learned, though I suspect that this is one quality that separated Benedict from the Master as well. The Abbot should strive rather to be loved than feared, and it is on the basis of his holiness of life, his likeness to Jesus Christ, that he draws his authority. What does this service look like? In the words of Abbot Thomas Keating, "Service is the hallmark of one who is sent by God. The true prophet, martyr, spiritual leader, or teacher does not try to dominate others....Jesus emphasized that he was sent by his Father and that he did nothing of himself. [Invitation to Love, p. 96]" So the Abbot himself, finally, is obedient to the Holy Spirit in conforming himself to the Suffering Servant.

In many monastic communities, the sacramental sign of Holy Thursday par excellence, the Mandatum or washing of the feet, is performed at table by the Abbot or Abbess. The one who is great among us must be as the youngest and the slave of all. On this day upon which was founded the ministry of the priesthood, let us pray that our priests and bishops will continue to lead us in a spirit of self-sacrificial service in persona Christi. For our part, let us renew a desire to submit ourselves to Jesus Christ through conformity to the wills of our spiritual mothers and fathers in the faith, that we be knit, bone and sinew, into the Mystical Body of Christ by mutual charity.

Please pray for me, that I may exercise my own spiritual fatherhood according to this teaching that I proclaim!

Let us, like the holy women, 'look on' [Luke 23: 49] the holy mysteries we celebrate in these wondrous days, that we may be transformed into the contemplative Marian and Johannine [John 19: 26-27] nucleus of the Church once more, that the Church may more faithfully serve humankind by proclaiming boldly that Christ has triumphed over death through the Holy Cross.