Does it strike anyone else as odd...

...that today people are likely to work on the Sabbath while we celebrate 'Labor Day' only once a year?

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.

The Future of Benedictinism

Pressed for time this morning, I am printing a reflection from two years ago that I had never quite finished...

Most places I travel the Benedictine houses are basically healthy and stable. We seem, as a confederation, to be moving toward a median house size which is perhaps between 10-25, and away from a time in which giant houses such as Gethsemane and St. John's were the flagships. While Benedictines generally exude a robust and creative fidelity, vocations tend not to flood in, as one might expect from the opining of certain talking heads who blame the vocations crisis on a flagging of orthodoxy.

The truth is that the monastic life, by the standards of the modern world, is deliberately boring. This is not at all to say that it is without challenges; indeed, the very ordinariness of the life brings daily challenges of fidelity and trust in God's providence. But it is to say that what monks do is a stumbling block to the world. This has always been part of the prophetic function of the withdrawal to the margins that is as fundamental aspect of the monastic commitment. Every generation has its blind spots, and an overemphasis on activity is one of our greatest. Hence, monasteries will not be rewarding places for those out to change the world b y doing good, by spreading the faith and so on. These are noble activities of course, but the enthusiasm that drives them is susceptible to abuse and burnout because of our cultural short-sightedness.

If this is the case, have Benedictines hope for the necessary vocations to continue our institutions? As I hinted above, many important houses continue to shrink, but many more smaller houses seem to be growing, if slightly. Obviously, I believe that faith in God and a willingness to invite people to monastic life means that communities will always be able to find a few willing to take the life on. On the other hand, the tradition is clear that the bias is in favor of turning newcomers away, or at least making them prove themselves. In a fickle world, any initial opposition is liable to turn a candidate's interest toward somone else. But a too-quick acceptance of candidates and a less-than-thorough probing of the novice's motives will allow in many who cannot live the life in its full parameters. Most communities adopt something in between: not making life tough on newcomers and making some allowance for their personal brokenness, hoping to mend it in some measure by monastic formation, and at the same time making the discernment process longer and keeping a certain burden of work always at hand which tends to discourage those unable to make the leap of faith necessary to understanding the 'hard and difficult way' by which we go to God.