Wisdom Distilled from the Daily

by Joan Chittister

  The Rule of Benedict lives and breathes from age to age. The Rule of Benedict examines and adapts from one century and culture to another. The Rule of Benedict guides people to an attitude of mind but does not smother them with sets of particular prescriptions. The Rule of Benedict is written for our lives and our circumstances as much as it was for any time past. It grows with the times and goes with the times and gives us a grasp, a railing, a guide that will not allow us to be ground down to spiritual nothingness and personal torpor by our own times.

  The monastic looks for holiness in the here and now, unburdened by strange diets or esoteric devotions or damaging denials of self. The real monastic walks through life with a barefooted soul, alert, aware, grateful, and only partially at home.

  So, what does it mean to follow the Rule of Benedict, to think with a monastic mind-set, to live life more as gift than as struggle?

  First, a Benedictine spirituality is a commitment more to principles than to practices. The Benedictine does not so much follow an horarium, or rigid daily schedule, as arrange a balance of life activities. The Benedictine does not so much follow a set of behaviors as develop an attitude of place in the universe that guides every conversation and every common act. Benedictine spirituality is more about living life well than about keeping the law perfectly.

  Second, Benedictine spirituality is simply a guide to the Gospels, not an end in itself. Benedict calls his rule “a little rule for beginners” (RB 73:8) in the spiritual life, not a handbook for the elite, or the literati, or the accomplished. Housewives and househusbands, maestros and career women, monastics and lay people, “all you who seek the Heavenly home” (RB 73:8), the Rule urges, not to spiritual gymnastics but to the contemplative awareness that the gospel and the gospel alone is fit criteria for any human action.

  Third, the Rule shows clearly that the living of the gospel life is not an individual enterprise of private whim and flights of personal fancy but a conscious gathering of the wisdom of others who can encourage us and help us scrutinize our own choices for their value and their valor.

  Finally, Benedictine spirituality rests squarely on the notion that we are not the only measure of our own spiritual needs but that the entire human community and cosmic universe have claim on the merit of our daily actions.

  In a world in which the planet has become the neighborhood and our personal lives are made up of unending streams of people, the Rule of Benedict with its accent on the spiritual qualities of life lived in common may never have been more relevant. I have begun to see under the covers of this age-old monastic rule a semblance of sanity to the insanity of the world around me.

  When I first entered monastic life, I was given a copy of the Rule. It made no sense to me. I wanted directions. I wanted a formula. I wanted holiness on the installment plan: buy now, pay later. It took me years to understand that if I paid now, I would get what I was looking for only if and when I had become what I sought. It took me years to realize that the Rule distilled years of experience, a kind of memoir of what Benedict believed spiritual life was all about and a record of what apparently had been the most effective ways of achieving it for that time. But it was not a blueprint at all.

  In Chapter 72 of the Rule, Benedict warns us about “wicked zeal,” the fanaticism and absolutism that make religion an instrument of oppression against ourselves and others. In Chapter 73, he promises, “If you fulfill this least rule . . . then you shall attain at last to the greater heights of knowledge and virtue.” I began to see this life would take constancy and patience and balance. We were into growth here, not into practices. This life would be about the sanctification of the normal, not about spiritual gymnastics. We were about a way of life, not about living life a certain way.

  As a result, I now find myself going to the Rule of Benedict when I wonder what the Christian response to ecological problems should be. I go to the Rule to find my way through the thickets of human relationships. I rely on the values and principles of the Rule to tell me how to deal with life’s vagaries. I look to the Rule to explain my depression and my frustration and my spiritual ennui. I depend on the Rule to help me get my mind off me. I see the Rule as a set of values that transcend time but have special meaning for my own days.

  I have written this book to share these years of reflections with people who I have found are just as serious about the questions and just as concerned about the way as I am. In the face of continuing confusions, shall we go back and be the old Church? Would that solve our dilemmas? Or is any church our answer in this day and age when churches themselves struggle with the nuclear questions, the woman’s question, the life-style questions, the pastoral questions, the family questions, the personal questions of alienation and unrest? What is spirituality in the midst of all of that: a rosary a day, meatless meals, a regular retreat, involvement on parish committees, public activism? The questions crescendo. The answers, I think, reside in things that neither come nor go with the years and the times. The answers lie in bringing wisdom, not recipes, to bear.

  These pages are my reflections on the wisdom that emerges in an ancient text about our very old, very new concerns. To live the Benedictine Rule, it is not a set of mechanics we need; it is a change of heart and a turn of mind.

  Once upon a time, an ancient monastic tale says, the Elder said to the businessperson:

  “As the fish perishes on dry land, so you perish when you get entangled in the world. The fish must return to the water and you must return to the Spirit.”

  And the businessperson was aghast. “Are you saying that I must give up my business and go into a monastery?” the person asked.

  And the Elder said, “Definitely not. I am telling you to hold on to your business and go into your heart.”

  This book is intended to help average people see today’s world through the filter of the Rule of Benedict and the yearnings of our own hearts.

  2

  Listening: The Key to Spiritual Growth

  Listen carefully, my child, to the master’s instructions, and attend to them with the ear of your heart. This is advice from a parent who loves you; welcome it, and faithfully put it into practice.

  Let us open our eyes to the light that comes from God, and our ears to the voice from heaven that every day calls out this charge: “If you hear God’s voice today, do not harden your hearts” (Ps. 94[95]:8). And again: “You that have ears to hear, listen to what the Spirit says to the churches” (Rev. 2:7). And what does the Spirit say? “Conic and listen to me and I will teach you the fear of God” (Ps. 33 [34]:12). “Run while you have the light of life, that the darkness of death may not overtake you” (John 12:35).

  RB PROLOGUE: 9–13

  The bells that ring over every Benedictine monastery are an archaic way to get a group’s attention to the order of the day, and, if that were their only purpose, there are surely better ways to do it. Buzzers and clocks and public-address announcements and blinking lights, for a few, would certainly do a better, more efficient job. But Benedictine bell towers are about more than the schedule of the day. Benedictine bell towers are designed to call the attention of the world to the fragility of the axis on which it turns. Benedictine bell towers require us to listen even when we would not hear.

  Years ago, when I was a young monastic, we were taught that when the clock chimed the hour we were to stop whatever we were doing and say the hour prayer. It was an old formula, long since dropped, and it is not remembered in its entirety by anyone in the community anymore. But we all know what it was meant to do. It was meant to make those of us who lived on missions away from the monastery where our bells did not ring, conscious over and over again of the frailty of life and the demanding presence of God in the minute by minute circumstances of our lives.

  “Listen,” the Rule says.

  “Listen,” the bell says.

  “Listen,” monastic spirituality says.

  And listening is what Benedictine spirituality is all about in a culture that watc
hes but very seldom hears.

  Benedictine spirituality is about listening to four realities: the Gospels, the Rule, one another, and the world around us. Most of us listen easily to one or two of these realities, but only with difficulty do we listen to all four. We read the Scriptures faithfully but fail to apply them. We listen to the needs of the poor but forget the reading of the gospel entirely. We go to spiritual directors regularly but ignore or overlook the insights of the people with whom we live. We prefer to hear ourselves than to listen to wiser hearts for fear they might call us beyond ourselves. Benedictine spirituality requires the medley

  One of the monastics of the desert taught the truth this way:

  A young seeker asked the Teacher, “I have received a command to do a good work, but there is danger of temptation in the place where I would have to go to do it. Because of the command, I wish to do it, but I am afraid of the danger.”

  And the old Teacher said, “If it were my problem, I would fulfill the commandment and that way I would be sure to overcome the temptation.”

  The spiritual life, in other words, is not achieved by denying one part of life for the sake of another. The spiritual life is achieved only by listening to all of life and learning to respond to each of its dimensions wholly and with integrity.

  The bells that call monastics to prayer ring outside the chapel as well as inside the monastery. They summon us from where we are to what we need to think about if the work we go on doing is to be pure and promising and prophetic. They lead us to where we can bring the Word of God to bear upon our own.

  The Rule of Benedict refers to Scripture as the voice of Christ (RB Prologue:19), a divine medicine (RB 28:3), and a weapon against the devil (RB Prologue:28). We listen to Scripture, in other words, to shield us from lesser motives. Scripture, prayed intently, calls us back on dull days to the overriding purpose of life. When nothing seems to have a purpose, Scripture puts us into direct contact with the Christ who seems, really, so far away from the office and the kitchen and the street corner. Scripture heals us of our own narrowness or smallness or struggles with faith in an age that says the purpose of life is to get ahead of our friends and be number one and make money and get prestige and put our faith in instruments of terror called a nuclear shield. Through all of this, the Scriptures bring us to watch the great figures of the gospel working through their own struggles of faith in times that were, for them, equally as perilous as ours. Benedictine spirituality depends on our listening to the Scriptures and finding a simple, practical way to live that good news outside the chapel, where we were when the bells first called us and where we will go again once we remind ourselves why we were doing what we were doing at the sound of the bell in the first place.

  Prayer in Benedictine spirituality is not an interruption of our busy lives nor is it a higher act. Prayer is the filter through which we learn, if we listen hard enough, to see our world aright and anew and without which we live life with souls that are deaf and dumb and blind.

  But prayer can be an easy substitute for real spirituality. It would be impossible to have spirituality without prayer, of course, but it is certainly possible to pray without having a spirituality at all. There are business people of our generation, for instance, who go to prayer breakfasts regularly and then raise interest rates on Third World debts and increase mortgage rates on housing loans and refuse aid to farmers but easily advance money to munitions companies. There are people who go to prayer groups and never give a cent to the poor. And there are monastics who go to chapel and forget that the function of reading the gospel is to become a gospel person, not an ecclesiastical hothouse plant.

  The fact is that the way Satan gets to the holy person may be through sanctity. “The wicked zeal,” Benedict calls it, “which leads to separation from God” (RB 72:1). Even sanctity, we’re being warned, can become a barrier to growth. Unless we can hear the needs of the other as well as the words of our favorite prayers, the prayer itself may be worth nothing more than hypnotic hollowness. It may make us feel like good people, but it will hardly make us better people.

  We prayed a great deal when I was a young nun. We prayed seven times a day for over three hours in all. In another language. On a rigid schedule. But no one ever came into our dining room. No poor slept in our houses. No children cried in our chapels. No refugees came to our doors. No one even thought to look to us for clothing or shelter or support or conviction about anything. We lived in one world. People lived in another. And we all prayed.

  Today, too, people go faithfully from church to neighborhood week after week and, then, between times give themselves entirely to making money and being nationalistic and having fun. In the meantime, Lazarus again waits hungry for the Christians of this time to notice his deprivation and stoop down to listen to him as the Lazarus of the gospel story waited in vain for help from the wealthy and pious Dives.

  The Rule of Benedict clearly emphasizes the need to listen to the people with whom we live as well. Benedict, who began religious life as a hermit—the norm for the time—soon left the cave to live in community and listen to the demands and insights both of the shepherds in the hills around him and of the monastics who gathered around him. No one was excluded from the role of heavenly messenger: “Receive the guest as Christ” (RB 53:1), he said. “Let the Abbot ask everyone beginning with the youngest” (RB 3:4). In monastic spirituality, life together—despite Sartre’s cynical suggestion that “Hell is other people”—is an opportunity for the presence of God to manifest itself, not an obstacle to it.

  Not to listen, then, is not to grow. But more than that, to be unable to listen is to be unable to give as well. It is easy to know what is good for someone else. It is difficult to listen and let them define themselves. Benedict puts the entire Rule in one sentence when, as his last will and testament of community, he says at the end of it, “Anticipate one another with honor, most patiently enduring one another’s infirmities, whether of body or character; vie in paying obedience to one another, tender love chastely, fear God in love; love one another” (RB 72:4-10). It takes a lot of listening to hear the needs of those around us before they even speak them. But there is no good human community without it. Listening and love are clearly of a piece.

  Benedictine listening is about more than attending to the Scriptures, praying, and being sensitive to the needs of those around us, though. Benedictine listening is about seeking out wise direction as well. It is one thing to try to hear what is in front of us. It is another to willingly expose our ideas to the critical voice of a wiser heart.

  Seeking wise direction—as the monastic does by living in the community and trusting its elders, its wise, its holy ones, its simple ones—is central to personal growth. Wives do that for husbands; husbands do that for wives; parents do that for children; counselors do that for clients; employers do that for employees. We must all learn to listen to the truths of those around us. We are poor shadows of listening hearts if we think that listening has something to do with simply taking orders. No, listening has something to do with being willing to change ourselves and change our world. Listening is a religious discipline of the first order that depends on respect and leads to conversion.

  It’s a point we so often forget. Wrapping ourselves up in the womb of religious ritual is no substitute for genuine spirituality. Spirituality is not an exercise in blind obedience, it is a commitment to divine reflection. The bells ring out around a monastery to alert people around us that we are listening to the Word of God, to put the world on notice that we may be different now, to warn the universe that we are trying to hear more clearly the whisper of God in the gentle breezes of life.

  The Word of God has never been for its own sake. The Word of God has always impelled. The Word of God sent Abraham and Moses and Mary and Mary Magdalene into totally new levels of commitment and consciousness. And the Word of God demanded no less intense degrees of commitment and consciousness when it came through Mordecai to Esther, through Samuel to El
i, through Elizabeth to Zachary. When we start listening to the Word of God, to others around us, to those with wise hearts and tried souls, life changes from the dry and the independent to the compassionate and the meaningful. When we start listening to the Word of God, people have a right to expect something new of us.

  But the Benedictine spirituality of listening puts us in dangerous territory. If we really listened to the Gospels, we would question a life-style that endlessly consumes and hoards and is blind to the homeless and unconcerned about the unprepared. How is it possible to listen to the Scripture about the rich young man, or the blind leper, or the grieving widow, and not know that in this century all the miracles for today’s poor and outcast and crippled depend on us? If we really listened to the people with whom we lived, could we bear to see children neglected or partners ignored or neighbors rejected? If we really took the thoughts of our hearts and the hopes of our lives to those wiser and holier than we for examination, how could we tolerate situations that could have and should have been ended before they began to eat away at our best selves?

  The Rule teaches us to listen to the circumstances of our own lives. We have to begin to face what our own life patterns might be saying to us. When we are afraid, what message lurks under the fear, a horror of failure, a rejection of weakness, panic at the thought of public embarrassment, a sense of valuelessness that comes with loss of approval? When we find ourselves in the same struggles over and over again, what does that pattern say: That I always begin a thing with great enthusiasm only to abandon it before it is finished? That I am always reluctant to change, no matter how good the changes might be for me? That I keep imposing unsatisfactory relationships with people from my past on every new person I meet? That down deep I have never given myself to anything except myself? Not to my friends. Not to my work. Not to my vocation.