Wisdom Distilled from the Daily

by Joan Chittister

  Mobility tempts interior stillness to the breaking point, however. Every store window holds a better bargain. Every relationship promises a more satisfying partnership. Every new place and new person and new possibility tempts me to try again, to try over, to try once more to find the perfect place or at least the place perfectly suited to me. But centeredness is an antidote to the fragmentation that comes from never settling in to where I am or what I’m doing or what I’m meant to learn.

  When the monastic makes a vow of stability it is a vow designed to still the wandering heart. There comes a time in life when everyone else’s family seems to have been better than my own. There comes a moment when having everything seems to be the only way to squeeze even a little out of life. There comes a day when this job, this home, this town, this family all seem irritating and deficient beyond the bearable. There comes a period in life when I regret every major decision I’ve ever made. That is precisely the time when the spirituality of stability offers its greatest gift. Stability enables me to outlast the dark, cold places of life until the thaw comes and I can see new life in this uninhabitable place again. But for that to happen I must learn to wait through the winters of my life.

  The problem is that perseverance and persistence are aspects of stability which the present world counts little. If our children don’t learn, we blame the teachers rather than expect the students to study harder. If the book is difficult, we don’t read it even if the intellectual struggle would be worth it. If the show is too long, we leave early even if that wastes the price of the ticket. If the work is hard, we quit. Stability, however, says that we have an obligation to see things through until we have done for them what can be done and, no less important, until they have done for us what can be done as well.

  Stability says we will walk the major roads of life unto the end, no matter what. There is, of course, a kind of pseudostability that is destructive. To fail to move out of situations that are unjust or demeaning or depersonalizing simply because I cannot find the courage to take the step is not stability. That kind of rootedness is a kind of bondage or suicide that comes from inertia, or entrapment, or a love of pain that betrays some twisted need for sympathy or pity or false martyrdom. Stability says that we stay with a thing in order to grow, not in order not to grow. Fidelity is to be valued, of course, but not at the cost of mental health. Humility is to be valued, indeed, but not if it implies becoming masochistic. Prayer is to be valued, certainly, but not instead of responsibility to others. Stability says there are some values beyond other values that ought to be pursued.

  Stability says we will stay with the humdrum if only to condition our souls to cope with the unfleeable in life. We stay with what, if we wanted to, we really could get away from so that we can come someday to cope with what we will not be able to leave.

  Stability requires us to be constant of heart and unremitting in our spiritual efforts. We don’t pray in hope of visions; we pray in hope of becoming prayerful. We don’t struggle in hope of triumph; we struggle in hope of growth. We don’t continue in hope of winning trophies; we continue in hope of winning the struggle to become better and stronger human beings than we were. If this is a thing worth doing, then I must do it. If this is a cause to which I can make a contribution, then I must make it. If this is a promise that needs keeping, then you must be able to count on my keeping it.

  Commitment, however, is not necessarily our long suit these days. Nothing in this society requires it and everything militates against it. It is not expected, after all, to promise to stay at a thing when something bad happens to it or something seemingly better comes along. It is not easy to continue the hard work of being here when everything around us says go there where it will be easier. It is hard to go on when it would be so much simpler just to quit. But the question becomes, what will happen to me as a person if I don’t go on, if I don’t persevere, if I don’t persist, if I don’t see this through? The answers are myriad.

  In the first place, I will certainly fail to learn a great deal about myself if I leave a thing before it’s finished. I will fail to learn the strengths that give me quality. And I will fail to face the weaknesses that call for change. I will end up being less than I can be. It is the image of Robert E. Perry stopping just one hundred miles away from the North Pole that tarnishes his image more, for instance, than if he’d never gone at all.

  In the second place, I will lose the opportunity to grow. Stability is the quality that enables me to confront life’s questions with both self-knowledge and self-giving. Not every question reveals itself at once. Not every effort succeeds at first attempt. Not every good thing that happens, happens without persistent purpose and continual failure. After Vatican II, for instance, religious life, parish life, and personal morality took erratic swings. People stopped going to church. Men and women left their religious communities. Some went the way of the past in order to maintain direction; others launched out into a chaotic present without map and without caution. Not a few left the spiritual life altogether. The critics said that God was dead, that religious life was over, that the Church had lost meaning. But there has never been a more exciting time, a more hopeful time, a more important time for followers of the gospel than now. Now spirituality has become a gift rather than a social expectation. For those for whom staying with the struggle demanded conscious commitment to faith alone, religion has taken on a meaning beyond itself. Indeed, the search for purpose and meaning and relevance has often become skewed these years and has seldom been clear. It has nevertheless managed to remain very, very important. The staying through itself, in fact, has often been the best part of the spiritual gift. The dark night of faith can be its own kind of blessing, just as staying through a relationship or staying through a crisis or staying through an illness can be a gift, too, if we stay for no other reason than to discover with open minds and accepting hearts who we are and what we are expected to give and to learn in this situation.

  To those who are pure of heart, to those who come to see God where God is, to those who persevere in the presence of God, to those who, as the Rule of Benedict says, “have used the spiritual craft without ceasing day and night” (RB 4:75–76) is promised the reward of a loving God: peace of heart and eternal life at the end of whatever daily deaths crowd our lives.

  Stability, in other words, is an outward demonstration of what we say is our inward disposition: the love of God in all things but especially in the humdrum and mundane, in the here and now and the them and those.

  Obviously, then, stability has to be more than centeredness and commitment. Stability must most of all be the sanctification of relationships, the discovery of friendship where perhaps once only chemistry had been. The fact is that stability is an invitation to live life deeply rather than to spend it superficially The temptation to flit from person to person, from commitment to commitment, from place to place in a mobile society is of very modern making. Our ancestors stayed with one job for a lifetime. They lived in their hometowns all their lives. Choice was not a luxury they had. Stability was their way of life.

  But modern society has lost that essential call to the depth and conversion that comes from knowing everyone and having everyone know you. Now we confuse community with living in groups. Yet lots of people who seem to be living with others are simply living alone together. People live in the same neighborhood together for years and cannot even call one another by name. People work for the same company all their lives and never even see one another. People go to the same schools together and never even know it. Indeed our lives are lived on the suburban surface of things, not in community at all.

  Ongoing revelation of God’s goodness depends somehow, though, on permanence, on realizing that God’s action in my life is different today from what it was yesterday and realizing that my actions in life are different today from what they were yesterday. To test and try all those dimensions of life takes time. It is one thing to speak kindly to an irritating stranger on Monday. It i
s quite another thing to go on speaking kindly to the same irritating relative, or irritating employee, or irritating child day after day, week after week, year after year and come to see in that what God is asking of me, what God is teaching me about myself in this weary, weary moment.

  What enables a person to keep going back to the difficult parts of life is, inevitably, certitude in the faithfulness of God. I do not keep the promises I’ve made, the contracts I’ve signed, the guarantees I’ve given because I am sure of my strength. I go on keeping covenants that would be easy to forego only because I am sure of the constancy of God. I am sure that God will keep God’s promises of presence and grace. I feed my ailing mother every day because I am convinced that God is God. I patch and patch and patch this marriage together because I have no doubt that God is God. I go on hoping in this difficult child because I am convinced that God is God. I continue to pray when prayer itself is a burden because I am certain that God is God. It is not myself and my own strength and my own fidelity in which I put my hope. I put my hope in the certain, the guaranteed, the gracious faithfulness of God. That’s what makes stability possible. That’s what makes stability imperative.

  Stability, you see, is essential to the ongoing revelation of the many faces of God in my life. Someday, somehow I have to see a thing through to the end or I will never come to know what I was meant to find there and I will never come to recognize the face of God that is hidden there and I will never come to be all that I could be there.

  Stability is what gives me time in life, time for God and time for others. If I rush from job to job and city to city and relationship to relationship, I never discover all the aspects of each. I never find the rhythm of life. I never touch all the dimensions of anything. I never get stretched beyond myself. I never become bonded to others. I never become something new. And alienation sets in.

  Then, finally, it becomes clear. Mobility is not the ultimate enemy of stability, alienation is. When nothing has touched me deeply enough to change me, nothing can touch me at all. I become a cardboard cutout that breathes. I learn to say the proper words, perhaps, but I never learn the grace that comes from anger suffered but not spat out, or pain borne but not denied, or love learned but never able to be expressed. I go through life on fast speed but numb.

  The Benedictine spirituality of stability is the antithesis of that. The Rule calls for steady, steady attention to everything: to prayer, to the service of the other, to the community as a whole, to regularity and continuity and manual labor and intellectual discipline, to “love of one another with chaste love” (RB 72:8). No one is excused from any of them. Life is a package to be opened in its entirety, not a smorgasbord to be sampled as it suits us.

  If there is anything, in fact, that reminds me that I am not a world unto myself, it is stability in my community: “the school of the Lord’s service,” “the workshop where I work out the spiritual craft” (RB 4). Stability implies both acceptance of the human community in which I find myself and immersion in it.

  It is so easy for people to come to live with others as if they were living alone. All they have to do is to stop noticing one another. But that is not a spiritual community at all. I need the conscious presence of other people to become sensitive to God’s presence, to hear the gospel Word in life through those who are speaking it around me, and to be able to express my love for Christ in a real way, in the other, in the world. Stability is the one sure tool we have to be certain that the world, for us, can really become a garden to be tilled rather than a candy store to be robbed.

  Stability, the willingness to continue to grow where I am, ironically, is the ground of conversion, the willingness to be changed. With these people, in this place, at this time I dedicate myself to rebirth and growth and maturity, both spiritual and psychological. With the help of these others, I can commit myself to the faithfulness of a God who is also unpredictable.

  Stability is a measure of love as well. Here in a stable relationship with others, we find that fullness of life is more than preservation of the self and that love is more than a matter of physical response, more than a mixture of fire and dynamite. It’s in stability that I find out that all love, to be true love, must, at least to some degree, be celibate. For love to be more than a passing mixture of fire and dynamite, it must come to withstand the days of no fire or dynamite at all. It must to some degree be more than sexual attraction and beyond sexual attraction. It must be made of friendship and mutual respect and spiritual integrity, or staying through will not only be impossible, it will be destructive. Friendship, in other words, is the call out of isolation and selfishness in order to teach me how to love and how to serve. But without stability, friendship—real soul-searing friendship, the kind that makes us choose between domination and infatuation and possessiveness and dependence for growth and freedom and depth and responsibility and self-knowledge—is impossible.

  Stability is what enables us, in other words, to live totally in God and totally for others. It is those two quests in life, in fact, that may be our only counterweights to pathological egotism in this self-centered world where whole nations can starve to death on our kitchen TV sets while we eat supper without even so much as raising an eyebrow about it all. What else can explain human callousness of that proportion except the lack of human caring that comes only from living through things with people? What else can possibly have led the human race to accept the prospect of nuclear annihilation in the name of “defense” if not the distances that have grown up between our worlds and the lives of those around us as we come and go and come and go through life, unrooted, unknown, and unattached?

  Is stability easy? Not on your life. But as the Desert Monastics told us, “It is by warfare that the soul makes progress.” And if, by living as responsible members of the human community, we can come to the point where “the sun never sees our anger,” then we will have come to fullness of life.

  That’s why, I have discovered after years of monastic life, there are crosses in those four particular places in the monastery: on the bell tower above the building to raise our hearts and efforts to levels beyond the mundane; on the chapel doors so that I can remember what life is really all about; on the refectory wall to make visible the gift of personal growth that community gives; over the prioress’s desk so that I can see the divine behind the human everywhere in life. That’s what those crosses say every time I see them: Stability. Stability. Stability. Stability.

  13

  Monastic Practices: The Way of Conversion

  These, then, are the tools of the spiritual craft. When we have used them without ceasing day and night and have returned them on judgment day, our wages will be the reward God has promised: “What the eye has not seen nor the ear heard, God has prepared for those who love him” (1 Cor. 2:9).

  RB 4:75-78

  My novice mistress and I did not always see eye to eye. She wanted silence when I was laughing. She wanted lights out when I wanted to study. She wanted unquestioning obedience when I wanted to discuss a thing. She expected fasting when I wanted an orange between meals. She wanted intense effort on things I would have preferred to treat once-over lightly. Now let there be no doubt: her way always won the day, but there is an enormous amount of difference between doing a thing and understanding it. And I thought I’d never understand it at all. As much as I loved monastic life, it seemed that everything was rigor and ritual, that there was no time here for the person, for the human, for the real. On the contrary.

  I would have understood better, I think, if I had just given a bit more thought to the practice of the receiving of the Rule and the receiving of the breviary. When I entered, I was given three books and three books only: the Rule of Benedict, the breviary, and the Book of Community Customs.

  The Rule was to enable us to transcend community to achieve union with God.

  The breviary was to enable us to pray with the community.

  The customs book was to enable us to live with the community.r />
  The Rule wasn’t all that clear. The breviary I could navigate with the help of the novices who marked every section of the Divine Office for us every day. And the customs book I understood only too well: the sisters were to leave the chapel in rank; the sisters were to keep their arms crossed under their scapulars; the sisters were to bow to the crucifix upon entering the refectory. The list of prescriptions was endless. It was an entire manual on how to bow and how to sit and how to organize the day and how to talk to the prioress and how to walk through the halls. The customs book covered everything in life, it seemed, and for a long time I considered it a lot more important than the Rule.

  As the years went by, though, the advantages of holding my hands just so, the tricks of walking lightly, and the niceties of bowing took their proper places in the lexicon of rubrics and ritual that made up days that were divided among the liturgical, the professional, and the contemplative dimensions of life. Then, too, the endless list of community conventions that were detailed in the formation program became unmasked for what they were: the requirements of any organized institution, the hall-marks of any well-ordered spiritual life lived in common. Finally I began to realize that the essential elements of monastic spirituality were in the Rule itself. The chapter is entitled, appropriately enough, “On the Instruments of Good Works.” It was there that I began to discover that there really are disciplines that guard the heart and open the soul to the Holy. The Desert Monastics explained it this way:

  It was said of Abba Isaiah that one day he took a branch and went to the threshing-floor to thresh and said to the owner, “Give me some wheat.” And the owner replied, “Well, have you brought in the harvest, Father?” And Abba Isaiah said, “No.” So the owner said to him, “How then can you expect to be given wheat, if you have not harvested?” Then the old man said to him, “Are you saying then that if someone does not work, they do not receive wages?” And the owner said, “Of course I am.” So the old man went away.