What is the underlying issue?
The interesting thing about the eleventh step’s approach to humility is that, unlike the tenth step, on the nature of laughter—which at first glance sounds so arcane—this one sounds so modern. So contemporary. So natural. We are, after all, a communication society that only midway through the twentieth century discovered the quandary and quagmire of interpersonal communication and set out consciously to decipher it. To discipline ourselves to the canons of it. After all, we have finally learned that on communication, almost totally, lies the future of human relationships.
This step of humility leaves no doubt: Holiness has as much to do with building community as it does with developing a routine of pieties. We are the sum total of what we do to others, for others, because of others. The way we speak to one another, this step makes clear, makes us look at ourselves as well as at our attitude toward people around us. If we bother to look at them at all.
For most of recorded time, communication was a series of formal dos and don’ts—do wear white gloves in public, do help women out of carriages, do show deference when speaking to an authority figure by lowering your eyes, do bow to some and nod to others. Every slight manner of speaking or relating to others was concerned with propriety rather than personalism. And most of even those things were practiced almost exclusively in high society, not among peasants and commoners, whose lives were more a matter of survival than social nicety. The eleventh step of humility, then, was far ahead of its time, far more about being humane than about merely being proper. This was a function of humility meant to bring people together in mutual respect rather than divide the world across a chasm of false obedience, false respect, false differences, and false emotions.
The other interesting factor in this step is that it was written first for monastics—vowed and professional religious—in a society more accustomed to hermitages than to communal religious life. Which means that Benedictine spirituality gives as much attention to talking as it does to silence. There is, then, inherent in Benedictine community living the concept that community is built on relationships, not simply on living alone together.
Finally, this step of humility requires the very basics of what contemporary social science calls “interpersonal communication.” Speech in a Benedictine monastery, we’re told here, is expected to be gentle, kind, serious, modest, brief, reasonable, calm, and emotionally controlled. Or to put it in more current professional terms, it is to be intentional, purposeful, relational, open, and mutually satisfactory.
Most of all, this step is a bold, bare instruction in human relationships. It’s not about giving orders. It’s not about exercising authority. It’s not about demonstrating our power or our intelligence or our public status. This step is simply and surely about what it takes to develop human community. To be clear: There is no step of humility that deals with the way we are to do our work. No, but there are several about how we are to live with one another—strangers though we may, to some extent, remain for all our lives.
We are to be clear about what we need from one another. There is no place in human community for hinting at things or manipulating people. We are to be direct but kind. Always kind.
We are meant, in fact, to engage with one another, to listen seriously to one another, to realize that life is not all about us. What’s even more clear is that good communication must never be all about us. Good communication listens. And then it responds in ways that make this interaction as good for the other person as we want it to be for us. It reaches out to the other. It discovers then what it is to have someone else reach back with the same amount of care and sensitivity we first gave them.
Good community life does not engage in baiting one another. We work together in order to get good things done well and at the same time to be friends to one another as we do them. Our communication is intended to create harmony—peace and equality—among us. But that can only be done by caring as much for the person whose help we seek as for the work we are about to do together. However good the work may be, it can never outweigh what happens to people emotionally as a result of the climate we create as we do it.
We do not lord it over one another. We are modest, this step of humility says. We are reasonable and calm. We are adults who know how to manage our own emotions and are keen to be sure that we do not incite another’s emotions at the same time.
This step gives us a clinic in what it means to be relational, to understand another person’s stake in the conversation. We are not to approach anyone with difficult or injurious words meant only to showcase our own power to make someone else’s life miserable.
Most of all, we are to deal with one another calmly and reasonably—no dispensations from civility given for age or professional standing or position and title. The older may not intimidate the younger; the professional may not deride the staffers; the ones with titles of any kind are not allowed to give orders and nonnegotiable commands to those who carry the weight of every day.
It is a call for what Daniel Goleman—now, centuries later—calls “emotional intelligence,” the kind of self-awareness that saves others from our sharpest tongues, our cruelest barbs—the parts of ourselves still to mature, not quite under control. It calls us to realize that emotions are a communicable disease. We catch them from one another, but we are each responsible for our own.
We must come to understand that our darkness can eclipse another person’s sun and so refuse to allow that to happen. The negative energy we create can undermine an entire group. It is our responsibility to create the rapport between us, the kind that makes a good family great, an institution a positive addition to society, an effective community a beacon of light to many.
I got it: In a hostile world, the eleventh step of humility frees us from seeing ourselves as the center of the universe when actually it is really all about everybody else.
What are the spiritual implications of this step of humility?
In some ways, the Rule of Benedict is much more bold about its definition of humility, of sanctity, than most of the spiritual language we’ve become accustomed to in recent centuries. It is a plain-speaking, real-time look at what makes for holiness. To Benedict the spiritual life is not a philosophical discussion or a theological treatise on the difference between spirit and matter.
From the first line on, the Rule of Benedict brooks no distancing nonsense, not a scintilla of an idea that holiness is about anything but the presence of God and the will of God for humankind in all things. The path is clear: Know that God is in the here and now. Don’t talk about earning God. You have God.
What follows after that, then, is simple: Remember that only God is God. The word humility itself—meaning “of the earth”—makes the point. We are not to make ourselves gods, a relatively common practice for rulers in the empire. Our role in life is to do God’s will for humankind. We are not to despotize anyone else, however privileged our origins. We are not to oppress anyone else, however powerless they may be.
The eleventh step of humility, one great dimension of which requires being gentle, being reasonable, being serious about life, leaves no doubt about the way we are meant to go about the human enterprise. And, most significantly, it is all within our grasp. It’s all about the way we live life and, most important, about the way we treat others. It’s about human community. It’s about what the twenty-first century needs most right now: a way to live well with those near us and a way to live well with the rest of humankind at the same time. We are here to build the kinds of community where everyone is equal, everyone is worthwhile, everyone is safe from ridicule and rejection.
In the eleventh step, the simplicity of it all is overwhelming. Speech, we learn here, is a gift. Speech is a tool of sanctity.
Holiness is not about hiding from the world in the depths of our rituals or in our distance from the questions of the time. On the contrary, the Rule plunges us into the great issues of life—human community, simplicity, equality, self-con
trol, and now into something as basic, as all-encompassing, as the way we talk to one another. There is no promise here of being able to buy our way into heaven with a string of pieties. On the contrary. The spiritual life, the steps of humility imply, requires a great deal more than that. It requires that we attend to the needs of others as well as we do to our own.
When we join the crowds calling out for the torture of our enemies, where is our gentleness then? When we applaud plans to export poor people back to their poverty so that we can all be richer as a result, how reasonable is that? When we expect special treatment for ourselves but ignore it for others, how modest, how humble, is that?
The truth is that egoism—the idea that my world begins and ends with me—is the bane of community. It warps and distorts the very soul of humanity. It makes those who shout the loudest the leaders of the pack. It abandons the basic principles of human community: relationship, interdependence, equality, and care. It is a barren spirituality that begins and ends with me.
Oppressive speech—sarcasm, rebuke, anger, abuse, derision, defamation—drowns out love and splits the world in two.
Human unity or world division begins with what I say to people and about them. To other nations and about them; to our enemies and about them; to our competition and about them; to our wounded, our hangers-on, our outcasts; to the little ones of our world. It’s the way we talk to the other that determines how much peace we ourselves bring to it. “Love thy neighbor” is, in the end, all about what I say to the rest of the world and how I say it.
Narcissism, on the other hand, deliberately sets out to make other people invisible, to suck up all the air in the room, to absorb all its light. But the eleventh step of humility repeats to us again and again that the others are there waiting for our care, not our censure or our curses.
One of the most poignant, most meaningful of the sayings of the Desert Monastics for our time is the story about an abbot and a peasant. Abbot Arsenius had a well-deserved reputation as a holy man, a learned man, a scholar, and an ascetic. He was rightly exalted and revered. The peasant spent his life cultivating his farm on the banks of the Nile as it flooded and receded from year to year. It was a difficult and largely thankless task, yet in its simple way maintained the community around it.
One day, the story goes, Abba Arsenius was asking the old Egyptian man for advice about what he was thinking. But someone overheard the conversation and said to him: “Abba Arsenius, why is a person like you, who has such a great knowledge of Greek and Latin, asking a peasant like this about his thoughts?” He replied: “Indeed, I have learned the knowledge of Latin and Greek, yet I have not learned even the alphabet of this peasant.”
The eleventh step of humility is not about playing at being nice to people whom I would otherwise normally not even notice. It is about coming to realize the real worth and skill and gift to humankind of every person I see.
It’s about beginning to understand that every person we meet is a gift of wisdom to us. We have something to learn from each of them. And we have something everyone we meet needs from us: a sense of value, a deep-down respect, a genuine admiration, a recognition of their contribution to the world.
The demon of idolatry ensnares us in a spiritual life whose boundaries are ourselves.
The eleventh step of humility frees us in a very obvious way from falling into the trap of really believing that we are, at least, our own idol—even if no one else’s.
The twelfth step of humility is that “we always manifest humility in our bearing no less than in our hearts, so that it is evident at the Opus Dei [prayer], in the oratory, the monastery or the garden, on a journey or in the field, or anywhere else…and constantly say in our hearts what the publican in the Gospel said with downcast eyes: ‘I am a sinner, not worthy to look up to the heavens’ (Luke 18:13).”
What is the challenge here?
The message we got as small children in first grade was short and sweet: Stand up straight, put your shoulders back and your head up; place your thumbs along the seams of your skirt or pants; and speak up! And it worked. Even the exercise itself elevated little people to think of themselves as bigger ones.
Years later, during a speaking engagement in England, a nun at the coffee break rushed up the center aisle to ask me “a personal question.” Those kinds of conversations always give me pause. People can ask anything in public after you give them permission like that. “Is it true,” she said almost conspiratorially, “that in America every child must stand up straight to answer a question?” I thought for a moment. “Yes,” I said, “as a matter of fact, it is true. We teach our children in first grade to stand up and speak out.” She nodded her head gravely and turned to look at the small cluster of people behind her. “You see?” she said to them. “That’s why Americans are so much bolder than we are.” I paused. Bolder? I thought to myself. If she only knew. Even after years of public speaking, I can still wilt at the thought of it.
Nevertheless, however national a mask it may have been, the American invitation to dignity, confidence, and self-assertiveness went deep. Year after year, grade after grade, the message got more and more ingrained. There was a way to carry yourself that had as much to do with who you wanted to be as it was about who you really were—in the back of the mind and the center of the soul, where it really mattered.
The message never changed: If you failed to stand up straight and speak out, you would be marked as a weakling. If you went through life bowed down and simpering, you’d never do anything of value. Behavior like that could only leave you looking like the wounded one in the pack. It would label you as one down, less competent, less ready, than the others around you. And before you even got started. If that wasn’t the message they meant for me to get, that’s the one I got anyway.
And yet, here, in a monastic setting that I hoped would be my life forever, I suddenly found myself having to deal with what seemed to be exactly the opposite message: Keep your head bowed, your eyes down—“everywhere, at all times, in all places.” Now what should I do?
There was a way to walk here, too, and a way to sit. A way to climb stairs and a way to walk down them—emphasis on walk. Keeping all the stipulations felt like putting on a suit of clothes that did not fit. That maybe would never fit. It seemed to be one whole way of life on a collision course with another very different one. How would I ever reconcile these two approaches to life, if ever?
It was a simple thing, this tension over how to walk down stairs, and yet it was the very struggle with it that got my attention first, that eventually changed the way I went about the rest of life. My basic inclination had always been to run first and walk later, to get wherever I was going before anyone else or at least not far after them. Speed was my trademark. Do whatever was to be done and do it quickly. Then, get on to everything else. Squeeze the most life out of everything quickly and then rush on to taste the rest of it. My favorite song was the White Rabbit’s song in Alice in Wonderland. I found myself humming it often: “I’m late. I’m late. For a very important date. No time to say hello. Goodbye. I’m late, I’m late, I’m late.” I had no time for what I thought was only propriety.
Yet, as the years went by, I got deeper and deeper into lectio, into reflective reading, and the Divine Office, and the very concept of contemplation. None of which could be hurried or packaged in small, short bites. The daily practice of simply stopping life to allow the soul to explore its essence rather than its externals opens up a Life within a life. With no particular end product expected from it, no mind-numbing number of prayers “to get in,” no checklist of special liturgical behaviors or postures to learn or exercises to complete, contemplation deepens us. It is immersion time for its own sake. It is a steeping in ideas, in Presence, in personal growth. It takes us beyond the accidentals around us to the very reason for our existence. Then, eventually, it changes us.
Slowly, quietly, over time, I began to understand what the twelfth step of humility has to say to a world that l
ives on image building. In a Madison Avenue, image-making, Photoshop society, the twelfth step of humility is a challenge to be who we say we are, no more, no less. In contrast, this society supplies the masks that make for a lifelong masquerade. They imply that pretense is more important than truth.
The twelfth step of humility is, I began to understand, a challenge to turn appearance into authenticity.
To “manifest humility in our bearing no less than in our hearts” requires us to become real rather than try to simply look good. It’s about knowing what it means to be true to ourselves. It enjoins us to admit what happens to our souls when we take up life in a never-never land of pretext and charade, of artifice and veneer.
And if we spend our lives lying to ourselves, disguising ourselves from the world, what kind of depth of soul can we ever possibly develop? When will anyone ever see in us the real depth, the total vision, the arc of honesty we so desperately wish could be acceptable to the rest of the world? Hiding is such a strenuous occupation.
The twelfth step of humility is an invitation to come out of camouflage. It prods us to discover that the love and acceptance we seek can only come when truth comes. Then the amazement at being accepted for who we are, under the skin, behind the inflated titles, despite the money, will be the euphoria for which we wait.
Clearly, the question under the question is the ultimate, the final one: Who are we really?
What is the underlying issue?
Who are we now? The answer to that one is: We are the only ones who really know.
Psychologists have been struggling for years to find the key to personal disintegration. What kind of stress is it that can collapse the very structure of a person’s life? What is it that threatens to unravel a personality, a commitment, a marriage, a goal? What is it that splits a person in two? Almost without a sign. In an instant. Apparently without warning.
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