Radical Spirit

by Joan Chittister

  And through it all, the fifth step of humility invites us to accept the antidote to our fear—self-revelation with someone who can treat our scars caringly and lovingly. Then, the liberation inherent in the fifth step of humility is plain. We are freed from our self-hatred, from the bonds of deceit, from the desire to hide ourselves where the world can never see us.

  And all of this in a time when the internet, its blogs, its oversharing, and its new outreach denude us for all the world to see. Seduced by anonymity, looking for the private revelation we need to untangle our complicated selves, we say things on a heartless, uncaring social medium which, ironically, will never, ever be really private again. We, who have spent life refusing to tell a single person where it hurts, tell the whole world now. And at once. Hidden still, but looking for community to heal the wounds we are carrying alone.

  And so the fear of exposure becomes, in this internet age, a paradox of privacy in public form. But with no guarantee of either loving care or professional expertise for the effort.

  Benedict of Nursia has been called the Great Psychologist by those who study his Rule and marvel at his understanding of human development. In this step of humility, he is particularly astute. His concern is not for sinfulness in the negative sense of the word but for the effects of sin and brokenness in all our lives. It is surely also a sin when we refuse to deal with the emotional detritus that weighs us down. Without addressing our brokenness, whatever burdens we carry—either as natural parts of life or by our own hands—stand to block our growth.

  Clearly, Benedict in this sixth-century Rule wanted members to honor their need for companions in this journey of self-worth and self-respect and self-sufficiency. He talks about wrestling with the muddled, raveling self with a loving companion. In this case, it is the abbot or the prioress who is mandated by the same Rule to see themselves as the Good Shepherd intent on saving the isolated, the abandoned, the straying sheep. But the basic point is clear: We all need someone who will hold our lives in loving hands as we grow.

  Benedict’s fifth step of humility is meant to be a model of love, of development, of care, and of growth. And, in the end, this step liberates us from false expectations and useless posturing, which destroy us even as they pose as salvific.

  No doubt about it: Such self-revelation was always meant to be about more than spilling food and water.

  What are the spiritual implications of this step of humility?

  What can be more frightening than the thought of having to face headlines that rip open my private life, leaving me unveiled and vulnerable to all the forces of nature around me? Now the church knows…Now my friends know…Now my colleagues know…Now my family knows. Except what if there is nothing disparaging to find out about me? Then what harm can anyone do to me?

  The social and spiritual ramifications of the open life are totally disarming. Once I say “I am an alcoholic,” what else can anyone say to embarrass me about that? When I finally admit, “My father died in prison,” what will they use against me? When I confess that in a fit of postpartum depression I tried to smother my last child, who will accuse me of what now? After they find out that I was indicted for embezzlement, what can they intimidate me with? What can they do when they discover that I’m gay if I’ve already told people that myself?

  I have sat in offices for years and watched frightened people draw new breath once the worst was said and nothing bad happened as a result.

  Better yet, perhaps, what can obstruct my own growth and potential once I’m no longer hiding from the world? I have now separated myself from the false image that has grown up around me. Having trusted someone to walk with me through my worst fears, I can afford to trust the whole world again. I have found wisdom and understanding enough in someone else to enable me to finally even trust myself.

  There is no substitute for such a moment of spiritual rebirth, of psychosocial health, of public fearlessness. What can anyone else do to me now? What can they tell about me that I have not told about myself? It is a moment of new growth, of renewed promise. The world is mine to embrace again.

  The truth is that self-revelation is the one thing that can end the game of charades I’ve been playing. I am now released from anyone’s and everyone’s false expectations. I can just be myself and that will be enough. In fact, it will have to be enough because there is nothing left to be secret about anymore. The talking can stop. All the wondering can cease now. The truth has been told and the world has not ended as a result. Ah, sweet relief.

  Even more astounding is the fact that I am finally rescued from the burden of perfection because the world knows now that I’m not. No one needs to measure me by any measurement other than the obvious. Yes, I’m a gambler. Yes, I never graduated from college. Yes, I had an abortion. And I grew stronger, greater, and more compassionate with other people for that very reason. The rewards of exposure know no end.

  “Those who swallow a stone become a stone,” the adage says. And counselors tell us that the struggles we hide only serve to consume our energies and sour our psyches. It’s time to put down the burden of silence, to live better and freer in the light than can ever be done in the dark places of life. It’s time to be ourselves. To be truly who we say we are. To abjure the temptation to exaggerate our credentials or heighten our pedigree. To risk the possibility of rejection by people we shouldn’t want to be approved by anyway.

  Indeed, once we admit who we are, fearlessness takes over. We are suddenly invincible. Why? Because nothing can frighten us any more than what we felt when no one knew anything about us but whose very lack of information kept us in chains.

  Life takes on a completely different hue once we tell just one person what it is that we’ve worked so hard at not saying. Yes, all our delusions of grandeur die. But in that case, we can’t possibly be disappointed by what we cannot dream of having in life.

  More than that, our self-righteousness dies, too. Not only are we capable of seeing ourselves and understanding ourselves and why we did what we did, but we can now understand others as well. I’m ready at long last to take my place among the healers and the truth tellers in society. I’m ready now to hold up others as others once supported me. These are the ones who, just like me, need to be freed from the “great masquerade” that is choking their souls. Like me, they have gone through life with no hope of finding someone they can trust. Now it is time for me to be there for them.

  A woman in her seventies, worn down by the shame of it all, appeared at my door, emotionally exhausted and distraught. “I have to tell you something,” she said. And then, though her story was garbled and disjointed, she poured it all out. She had been abused regularly as a child by her seminarian brother, the apple of her mother’s eye, who she knew would never believe anything bad of him. There was no one who could help her, no one to turn to. She had been working with a psychiatrist for years, making very little progress, but had said nothing about this trauma to the doctor. Maybe because he was a man, maybe because he was a public figure. Now, though, having told one person, she was finally free of the fear of talking about it and the breakthrough came quickly. But, oh, far, far, too late.

  Softened by having learned to accept myself, I have something honest to tell other people. Once I stop using the condemnatory language of the streets, those who see themselves as outcasts can hear the understanding they’re looking for in my voice. It is a magnet for those who have heard nothing but condemnation—their own or everyone else’s—all their lives. It is a tone made in heaven so that a bit of heaven can start here for everyone.

  As Mary Lou Kownacki writes, “Who is it that we would not love, if we only knew their story?” And on the other hand, who can we truly love if we do not embrace our own story?

  The demon of secrecy stunts our growth and clips our wings. Without the process of self-revelation and the genuine humility it brings, we doom ourselves to go on hiding within ourselves forever. We have chained ourselves to the eternal disguise of a false self
that demands more and more trappings behind which to hide. We will never come to the liberating relief of the true self.

  With the courage of self-revelation, on the other hand, the humility that comes frees us for the fullness of life. After all, the attempt to feel better about ourselves by collecting empty symbols of adulation and power, we know now, never really changes much at all. But one thing is finally clear: We don’t need the lies and subterfuges and image making anymore. Now all we need is the awareness that to be myself is all the self I have and it is enough.

  The sixth step of humility is to be “content with the lowest and most menial treatment.”

  What is the challenge here?

  I read an article recently entitled “Ten Most Expensive Useless Things to Buy.” Among them were a million-dollar box of chocolates, a $68,500 cricket ball, a $225,000 bottle of liquor, and a $130,000 TV. “What else is needed for total happiness?” the article asked.

  It stopped me for a moment. This had to be a joke. But no, not only were these things available for sale but the bottle of liquor and the cricket ball had already been bought. It was the most expensive list of trinkets I had ever seen. What is it, I wondered, that could possibly prompt anyone to buy anything like this? And what does it have to do with the spiritual life? With the emotional life? With any kind of real life at all?

  One thing for sure: The Twelve Steps of Humility—Benedict’s distillation of Benedictine communal spirituality—recognize the allure and the danger of such an exaggerated, profligate attitude toward life.

  Yet, if any of the steps are designed to refresh our thinking, to stretch us, this one is surely it.

  In my own life, the sixth step of humility, with its call to constraint, has been a constant prod. But to what? The very wording of it stops my heart in midbeat and spins the world around. Stark and short, blunt and unforgiving, we are, it says, to be “content with the lowest and most menial treatment.” I winced at that one in the early years. And I still wince a bit now. The American mind rebels: Lowest? Most menial? Impossible. Unacceptable. Approaching the ridiculous. After all, this is the twenty-first century.

  Right. And, as if written especially for this moment and place in time, the sixth step of humility forced me to look again and again at the way I was living it. It required me even more to ask myself what my life was becoming as I went on. Was it simpler? Or more complex by the day? Worse, had I become indifferent to the whole issue?

  When we were new members in the community, up until the mid-1960s, they gave each of us three habits, three coifs or headbands, three veils, and two pair of shoes. One set was for Sundays, one for daily wear, one for work. I figured then that there was nothing much to think about where the sixth step of humility was concerned. It had already been decided. But I feel very differently about that now. There is, in fact, a great deal more to think about here than counting blouses or having more than two pair of shoes. And all of it touches a person very deeply, very specifically.

  Instead of simply expecting things from the system, like uniform clothes or institutional furniture, I found myself required to choose carefully now. Like everyone else, we were children of our age. Like Israelites climbing the Tower of Babel, we knew ourselves to be the generation for which the sky was indeed the limit.

  I watched the years go by—as we shifted away from a universal desire for “enough” to a deep-down spiritual ache for everything in sight. To a sense of deprivation in affluence. But more than that, to the very inflation of the sense of self and the ballooning of grand expectations. I came to understand that the sixth step of humility was about more than consumerism and the amassing of goods. What is every bit as important as the amassing of things in Benedictine spirituality is the danger of getting seduced by delusions of grandeur. And that’s where humility comes in.

  One day something happened that made it all glaringly clear: I was in an island country as the guest of a friend. He’d just bought a native cottage on a small piece of land that fronted the sea. He’d added a tiny kitchen, a minimum of sewage and electricity, and, best of all, a large screened-in porch. Most of all, he was, as the Scripture said, “going out to the highways and byways and inviting people in”—no rent asked, no fees applied. Which is exactly how I got there. We slept on cots and couches and in one tiny bedroom. We lived on the big, broad porch and ate canned tuna and local fish. It was a magical place. After all, the breeze was soft, the sea clean and clear as an aquamarine, the rain was fierce and untamed and soul-searing. It was an excursion into the natural and the real and the enough. And more than that, it was a display of selfless generosity.

  On Monday, I went the couple of miles to the small hotel down the single-lane road to check in with the office back home. There was a small, tense American woman beside me at the only bank of pay phones on the island. And she was very angry. Her voice was getting higher and higher, more and more angry. “I paid plenty to come down here,” she said, “and this is a mess. You people told me that it was a beautiful sunny spot and all we’ve had for three days is rain, pouring down rain.” I heard a few words from the even-sounding voice on the other end, but she broke in again. “I want out of here. Today.” A few more words on the other end and then, “What do you mean there are no planes until Thursday! This is a disgrace. I will never use your agency again! And I have no intention of paying you!” Then she banged the phone down and tromped away.

  If there were anything in modern life that cried our loud for the sixth step of humility, this had to be it!

  Things in themselves, I understood, are far outside the confines of Benedict’s sixth step. Rather than to wealth and power, this step is a universal call to become the kind of person who can tell the difference between self and nonself, between the true self and the false self, between having enough and demanding privilege. It is a call to go through life with a very finely measured notion of what it really is that makes for freedom and for authenticity. For authenticity, for sure.

  All of which is fine to say years later, but in those first years of the spiritual search in a rapidly encompassing material world, the confusion such statements stirred up in my soul was genuine—and disconcerting. It was clear that Benedictine spirituality was light-years away from what my world taught me was even dignified, let alone successful. Or properly ambitious. Or the good life. Or progress. But what else was there? The answer was easier now: It was about being “content with the lowest and most menial treatment.”

  In this new world, everything of importance, it seems, is measured in things. Things that are bigger—meaning better, meaning modern. Like bigger cars or bigger computers or bigger wardrobes or bigger plans. As heirs of financial-technological societies, getting ahead is what we’re about. To even suggest anything else seems so out of sync with the essence of what it means to be human now. Here in the West at least. And yet, what can we possibly do about it in what is, by nature, a culture of accumulation?

  Most of all, what does that have to do with my personal level of spirituality? Just because I live in a country of cheap clothes and mass production centers?

  At one level it is a serious conundrum. At another level, I realized one day when I reread “are content with the lowest and most menial treatment” that this small step toward humility could have been written expressly for this culture at this time. Or for any culture and for each of us who find ourselves slipping into the malignancy of commercial engorgement, of wanting the “more” of Madison Avenue life to the detriment of all life’s other gifts. Because in a world of things by which to measure our human progress or declare our status, it is oh, so easy, so natural a thing to do.

  I was arranging the relics of my life on the open shelves in my office one day—feeling a little guilty, if truth were known, that I even had such things. Each of the small pieces—a set of worry stones from China, a carved Bible stand from Africa, a candle from a Benedictine abbey in Europe—was a sign to me of the affection that has carried me through the dry spots in life.
The pictures, the mementos, the little gifts that have a meaning no one but I can possibly know, touch an untouchable part of life. Were these my priceless trinkets, like the million-dollar box of chocolates and the $68,000 cricket ball they were selling on the internet these days?

  Then I recited the sixth step of humility to myself again—to be “content with the lowest and most menial treatment…” And this time, I got it. This step of humility isn’t really about whether we should have things or not, as important as that may be to the spirit of simplicity. The statement is clear: It’s about the treatment we come to expect from the world around us that makes the difference between humility and narcissism, between simplicity of life and overbearing self-importance. It’s about the American woman who expected the world to get her out of the rainstorm that inconvenienced her vacation. Today. And to return her ticket money as well.

  The fundamental question the sixth step of humility raises, I finally realized, is not so much what I have but why I expect it and need it and demand it.

  This step of humility, to be “content with the lowest and most menial treatment,” is more about walking into a room and not expecting to sit in the best chair. It’s not about whether I own the chair. It’s about not assuming that I should never have to wait in line to talk to the bank manager like the rest of the population. It’s about learning never to expect public attention, free tickets, and special mention. It’s a matter of learning to go through life like the Jesus who was laid in a manger, lived as a carpenter, and died on a cross.

  There is, it seems to me now, one issue that connects an obsession for things, an addiction to status, and the tendency to an exaggerated sense of self. It is the spiritual superficiality that comes from a fundamental confusion between the true self and the false self. The true self has no secrets from itself and harbors no notions of being the center of the universe, however large or small the universe at issue may be. The true self is happy with the self that it is.