Radical Spirit

by Joan Chittister

  Copyright © 2017 by Joan D. Chittister

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Convergent Books, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  crownpublishing.com

  CONVERGENT BOOKS is a registered trademark and its C colophon is a trademark of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data has been applied for.

  ISBN 9780451495174

  Ebook ISBN 9780451495181

  Cover design by Jessie Sayward Bright

  Cover lettering by Andy Luce

  v4.1

  ep

  This book is dedicated to two Benedictine Sisters whose own spirits give life to the Radical Spirit of Benedictine monasticism:

  Sister Maureen Tobin, my lifelong friend and personal assistant, who embodied and modeled the Benedictine tradition and spirituality this book explores.

  Sister Mary Lou Kownacki, OSB, has spent her life making this spirituality new again for our own times.

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Introduction

  RADICAL SPIRIT

  The First Step of Humility

  RECOGNIZE THAT GOD IS GOD

  The Second Step of Humility

  KNOW THAT GOD'S WILL IS BEST FOR YOU

  The Third Step of Humility

  SEEK DIRECTION FROM WISDOM FIGURES

  The Fourth Step of Humility

  ENDURE THE PAINS OF DEVELOPMENT AND DO NOT GIVE UP

  The Fifth Step of Humility

  ACKNOWLEDGE FAULTS AND STRIP AWAY THE MASKS

  The Sixth Step of Humility

  BE CONTENT WITH LESS THAN THE BEST

  The Seventh Step of Humility

  LET GO OF A FALSE SENSE OF SELF

  The Eighth Step of Humility

  PRESERVE TRADITION AND LEARN FROM THE COMMUNITY

  The Ninth Step of Humility

  LISTEN

  The Tenth Step of Humility

  NEVER RIDICULE ANYONE OR ANYTHING

  The Eleventh Step of Humility

  SPEAK KINDLY

  The Twelfth Step of Humility

  BE SERENE, STAY CALM

  Appendix

  THE RULE OF BENEDICT: CHAPTER 7

  Acknowledgments

  Consider this moment another step in your search for a direction in life that is tried and true. It intends to open your heart and mind to the wellspring of your spiritual self. It can launch you down the path to the fullest kind of human development.

  This book is an invitation to internal freedom, to the achievement of the free and authentic life. Most of all, it is rooted in ancient spiritual wisdom that echoes the insights of the ages and, at the same time, sings of a fresher, truer tomorrow.

  You are not alone in your quest. The quest for internal freedom and an authentic way of life is common to everyone, to every generation, to every era. But few, other than the ancient mystics, contemplatives, and spiritual seekers of the ages, have had real answers for how to achieve it. Abba Zosimas, a monk in fifth-century Palestine, instructed his disciples very clearly about the inner chains that hold us captive. He told them, “It was well said once by a wise person, that the soul has as many masters as it has passions.” And again, the Apostle Peter says, “People are slaves to whatever masters them.”

  This book is about recognizing what has mastered us and then discovering what it will take to break those chains.

  Chained to the present moment by agitation, anger, our addictions, anxieties, fear, stress—whatever the spiritual wrestling match of the day—the pursuit of freedom in a world in perpetual motion is an ongoing one.

  In this society, in fact, the search for personal freedom has become big business. Whole industries have been constructed around it—financial consultantships, pharmaceuticals, psychology, tourism—all of them purporting to provide the process for finding personal peace, the tools for removing angst, the way to escape ourselves. But those things never really work. They serve for a while to dampen the groaning, empty pain of it, perhaps. But, in the end, the strictures arise to chafe again. And the first question is always, Why?

  Why this impression of internal captivity? Why this sense of emptiness in me? Why my resistance to change? Why the everlasting weight of ghostlike burdens we simply cannot seem to shrug off? And then the second question, Is there no way to deal with this? With what plagues us? Is there no way to escape this? Is there no help, no direction anywhere that can soothe the irritation, subdue the endless ambition, relieve the demands for more in me?

  Yes, actually, there is. Self-understanding, a commitment to spiritual growth, a spiritual tradition that has stood the test of time, and a spiritual guide to companion us on the way are the components of the spiritual journey. Each of them requires conscious attention. Each of them is clear.

  The understanding of what blocks my growth in life requires deep honesty from me. The struggle to unbind myself from the passions that hold sway over me takes both discipline and support. The search for a spiritual tradition that points me beyond mere religious ritual to a spiritual “true north” gives me an established path to follow. And, finally, the steady presence of a spiritual guide to help me find my way from one question, one step, to the next along the way is a lifelong guarantee of spiritual freedom from the demons within.

  And that is why I wrote this book. There is a spiritual document written in the age of Zosimas that gives us a veritable program of liberation. It is a spirituality for the whole of life. Designed to free us from our troubled selves and so from the effects of a self in turmoil, it leads us from one spiritual dimension of life to the next until, eventually, all of life becomes one sacred act.

  The Benedictine spirituality that is the foundation of this book is centuries old, but the humility that undergirds monastic spirituality which emerges in Chapter 7 of the sixth-century Rule of Benedict is timeless and lives on to this day. The Twelve Steps of Humility are the centerpiece of this book, in fact. Not because they are old but because they model a way to the freedom of heart and soul which we seek. Best of all, they are sure proof that such freedom is possible in a world where demagoguery is the new political brand, where narcissism is too often misunderstood to be leadership, where pathological individualism in the name of freedom and independence is confused with healthy personal development and spiritual maturity.

  This entire document is about growing into the consciousness of God. But, the key to this quest lies, Benedict says, in “humility.” These twelve steps are explicit and basic to any group, any relationship, any search for God in life. They’re about recognizing the place of God in our personal lives. They’re about learning from the wisdom figures we discover in life so that the good they did for us we can go on doing for others. They’re about coming to grips with the nagging hungers of the self. They’re about realizing the spiritual impact of our own growth on the human relationships around us. They’re about becoming authentic human beings, honest about ourselves and free from the narcissistic nonsense that drives the modern age to glory in itself. They’re about being free to become the best—the rest—of ourselves without the chains of false expectations.

  Grappling with these deep-down, heart-hardening things takes the soulful persistence of a lifetime, and yet, ironically, it is these things which we confront in ourselves that are exactly the parts of ourselves most worthy of our own patience and mercy. The demons with which we struggle as we go through life are the very things that make for our greatness. In fact, it’s these that make us holy and tender with others while they bring out the best in us. And it is these for which we need the most gu
idance, the most understanding, the most support.

  The Twelve Steps of Humility, I have learned over the years, are a spirituality program for a lifetime, the kind that never loses meaning, and so never really gets old. They turn us toward the God of Liberation through all the stages of our growing.

  These steps of humility, over fifteen hundred years old now, are guides, tested and found true from one century to another. Like wisdom figures in our midst, centuries later, they have shown me the way to new life over and over again. As my own life shaped and reshaped itself from one phase to another, the degrees of humility forever saved me from myself. They oriented me toward happiness rather than excitement, beyond pleasure to serenity, over and above secular notions of success. But I didn’t always know it.

  The problem is that at first glance, at first hearing, the modern mind recoils from the very concept on which this process of the liberation of the self from the self is based. Even the word humility has an odious tone in a world where the attention on “I” is so much more central than the value of “we.”

  The sadness is that because, as countercultural as the idea of humility is, everything in our culture militates against our even taking time to explore it. We are afraid to immerse ourselves in a spirituality that strikes at the core of errant ambitions and the dangers of the image building to which our culture calls us. And yet, this very spirituality is meant to free us for the freedom of the spirit we need and for which every person struggles along the way. More than that, humility is our only answer to globalism, to world peace, to economic justice, and to equality. Until humility becomes a factor of life again, the mark of culture and the antidote to narcissism, we condemn ourselves to both personal and national disintegration.

  And yet, humility is not, by and large, a Western thing. In too many cases, the spiritual literature on humility has been confused with a penchant for humiliations—and so ignored by modern readers who need the balm and balance of humility most. But not here. Here, in the ancient Rule of Benedict, humility becomes the way to the freedom of heart and simplicity of soul that put the human soul at peace in a confusing, competitive, self-centered, and violent world.

  In the Rule of Benedict, a small document of seventy-three short chapters on how to live a holy and loving life, humility is about understanding and realizing the truth of the self. It is how we see ourselves that determines how we see and interact with others. It is how we respond to others that determines how we fare and what we become in the human community. And it is humility that stands to set us free. Free from the ambition that drives us, from the angers that rule us, from the greed that consumes us, from the chains we have mistaken for success and superiority.

  Humility in the Rule of Benedict is the spiritual hinge on which the rest of life depends. The full truth of what it means to be spiritual, to be “of God,” to be a force in the world for equality, justice, compassion, and human dignity depends on what we mean by humility. In a world torn by violence and a social system built on always grasping for more, humility emerges as the glue that can finally unbind us from ourselves. Then, we are prepared enough to swathe society, family, personal relationships, community, and the human race with care, with justice, with the kind of love that makes life worthwhile for us all.

  The Benedictine Rule—like all wisdom literature—is clearly meant for every age. Without the breadth of spiritual perspective this document brings, we are all left to stumble through life with no clear path, no clear goal. We limp along, always seeking God but forever wondering why we must struggle against the lust for perfection, why all the prayers we say are not enough to release us from the albatross of ourselves.

  This book is about what it means to develop a deep and definitive spiritual life from day to day. It is ancient Benedictine spirituality that has been a filter through every age and is seen here through the filter of our own times and individual decisions and struggles.

  This book asks what spirituality and humility can possibly mean to us now and in this age. It leads us to recognize that the roots of integrity, of peace, lie in the earthiness, in the humus, that is our nature.

  In this book, each of the steps of humility is examined from three vantage points: First, I ask myself how my attitude toward these steps evolved in my own understanding as a Benedictine, as a woman, as a seeker, over the years. It has not always been a salient or simple process.

  Second, I take each step of humility off the page and explore the issues and questions implied in each of them here and now. To understand what the ancients were really addressing and why they were dealing with it as a central part of the spiritual life. It asks, Is union with God really possible? What happens to individuality if a person is humble? How does something as questionable as humility change the quality of life for the seeker as well as for the world around us? It looks at the prerogatives and pitfalls of a false independence. It questions whether humility doesn’t really suppress personal development. It looks for the difference between healthy pride and narcissism. It plumbs the place of human relationships in spiritual growth. It looks at the very modern questions that underlie the struggle with which each particular step of humility challenges us.

  And finally, in the third segment of each chapter, I concentrate on the spiritual implications of humility for an individual’s ultimate and empyreal growth. It brings the wisdom of the ages to bear on the struggles that come with trying to negotiate between the ways of the world and the ways of God today.

  This book shines a light on the way to profound peace between us and the passions that drive us. It brings into focus the juices, the energy, the desires that, good as they are, augur to propel us into darkness. It sensitizes us to the impulses in need of gentling in ourselves if we are ever to become the light of God we are meant to be for others.

  And always, it explores the place of humility in an individual person’s spiritual life and the search for the fullness of personal human development.

  It invites you to open up the dailiness of life and find God there. It invites you to become a “radical spirit,” to put down your chains, to opt for a life that is free and authentic.

  Indeed, the message of Zosimas rings on here: The chains we struggle with are the chains we have forged for ourselves. They are the chasms of fear and contempt, the greed and arrogance, the hunger and emptiness we have yet to fill with the kinds of things that give our souls wings.

  Or, to put it another way, welcome to the eternal search for the fullness of life.

  The first step of humility, then, is that we keep “the fear—the reverence—of God always before our eyes (Ps. 36:2) and never forget it.”

  What is the challenge here?

  Humility has never been easy for me, at least not in the way it’s written about in Chapter 7 of the Rule of Benedict.

  I remember it all too well: It was 1952. I was a novice then, and preparation for full membership in the community was intense. Study, prayer, and almost total withdrawal from society marked that year as special, as different.

  We didn’t take college classes. Instead, we studied only the sixth-century Rule of Benedict, which formed the framework in which we would live out the rest of our lives. We not only prayed seven times a day but we studied the Latin in which the prayers were written in order to make those prayer periods understandable. Most of all, we concentrated on the Rule itself and, particularly, its cornerstone chapter, “Of Humility.”

  Every morning, in fact, we took an hour out of the day’s regular duties—like baking altar breads or cleaning the chapel, washing windows or working in the kitchen—to study the Rule of Life under which we would soon promise to live. And that reading alone, not the manual labor, could well have been enough to make any thought of taking another step in the process impossible.

  First, the Rule itself had been written fifteen centuries before this novitiate. Second, the book needed a good editor. Its language was for the most part musty and terse. And at least to a teenager in 1952, in a
postwar era that had new and liberating written all over it, the ideas were chilling. One, in particular, drew my attention—and troubled me deeply: We were to “keep the fear of God always before our eyes and never forget it.” Life was to be about “the fear of God”? Oh, great.

  Years later, of course, they told us that “the fear of God” was now an archaic term, which meant “a mixed feeling of dread and reverence,” but no one stressed the “reverence” of it in those days. “The fear of God” was the current translation, the defining essence of the relationship, and it stuck.

  But I was young and new to monastic life, and the very language of this first step of humility was itself enough to be discouraging. What did it mean to “keep the fear of God always before our eyes”? I found the words stifling. Threatening, if truth were told. This God, it seemed, forever hovered over us just waiting for us to slip up. Then all heaven would pounce and, as the old Church manuals made so clear, close the gates of life to us forever. How could we possibly reverence a God like that, a God waiting in the dark, a specter in the night?

  We were, I figured, entrapped by the presence of God, not liberated by it at all: This God sees “the thoughts of my heart,” the chapter on humility put it. A discouraging thought in itself. We were condemned in that case just for thinking about something, before we even got a chance to try it. And yet, over the years, another light began to dawn: If that was true, then something else was surely just as true. This God who knew everything had to know, too, how hard I was trying to live decently, to love deeply, to grow beyond the gaps in my soul. And that, at least, was a calming thought.

  But, there was something else that still bothered me: How was it even possible to claim to have nothing but God on my mind? How realistic could any of this be? My spirit sank. Did any of this chapter make sense? And if it did, would I ever be able to do it? I knew down deep that if the way this chapter read were really the way things were meant to be, I doubted that I would ever manage to get it right.