Wisdom Distilled from the Daily

by Joan Chittister

  For Benedict of Nursia, community was the place in which we worked out our own responsibility to continue the task of creating a just and gentle world. Benedictine spirituality calls us to bear with one another and hold one another up and call one another to growth and so become whole and holy ourselves. It’s in the community of my neighborhood and family that I learn my own weaknesses and can give all my gifts. It is in community that I discover the effect of a spoiled ozone layer on everyone else and can work to save them as well as myself. It is in community that I see the evils of sexism with its unnatural limitations on both women and men and can bend myself to making the book of Genesis complete. It is in community that I see the lie of national chauvinism and can work to make my own nation more kind. It is in the community of my own life that I can begin to build a better life.

  To a nonstop world, the Rule of Benedict brings balance and simplicity. In the face of a complex world with its twenty-four-hour workdays and constant motion, the Rule asks for a life that deals with a little bit of everything in proper measure: work, prayer, solitude, relationships. The Rule, in other words, is an antidote to excess and to human dwarfism. A proverb says, “Wherever there is excess, something is lacking.” The Rule of Benedict man dates a measured life.

  The Rule of Benedict says to our times, too, that humility is more important than power, that arrogance is destructive of the human spirit and, in our case perhaps, of the world itself. Humility is the quality that calls us to let God be God in our personal lives and to take our proper place among all the creatures of the earth. Humility says that to hold the world hostage to nuclear weapons when we need food and housing and medical care and negotiation, is arrogance raised to high art. Humility says that we must all learn to listen and to hear, to negotiate rather than to force, to trust rather than to terrorize, in both our neighborhoods and our nations.

  Monastic mindfulness is what concentrates us on the right things in life. When we learn to be aware of what is around us as well as in us, we begin to connect with the rest of the world in new ways. We become conscious of little things and their beauty. We come to see obscure things and their meaning. We are touched by quiet things and their power.

  When we learn to be where we are, we gain perspective on life. Yesterday loses its hold on us and tomorrow loses it allure. Where we are becomes the ground of our salvation, the reason for our joy and the acme of our achievement. Monastic mindfulness calms the storms of life and gives them meaning. Monastic mindfulness makes the present, present and gives us back the energy that endless worry and constant calculation drain. It concentrates what has become scattered and brings us home to ourselves.

  Obedient listening teaches us critical discernment. When we are overcome by all the cacophonous commercials and unrelenting demands and spurious advice that our society has to give, obedient listening is what enables us to filter all the messages through channels that count: the good, the true, and the beautiful. Obedient listening evaluates everything, not in the light of what is good for me but in the light of what is best for all of us. It is the call to bring the foolish standards of the gospel to the issues of our times. Obedient listening is designed to bring us to growth, to truth, and to holy responsibility—for our own lives and for the lives of the entire human community.

  The call to “treat all things as if they were the vessels of the altar” (RB 31:10) is the call to steward the earth, to treat it reverently, to hold it in loving hands. It is the call to keep what is usable, to care for what is vulnerable, to safeguard what is fragile on this planet. It is the call to preserve the environment and to clean our houses and our streets and our woods and to stop pollution. It is the call to save the earth for our children.

  The twenty-first century is indeed a Benedictine century. We need stability in relationships, creation rather than destruction in the works we do, a Christian attitude toward life and a commitment to balance that slows the frenetic pace of our personal lives, our family lives, and our national lives. Benedictine spirituality offers all of that and more.

  The Rule of Benedict was a spiritual document written for males raised in Imperial Rome. But to Roman men in a patriarchal culture who were trained that domination and status and power were their birthright and their purpose in life, the Rule insisted on new ideals: humility, listening, community, equality, and service. It was a very feminine vision. It is a vision still very much needed today.

  It is family, not social life, that is needed in our time too. It is equality, not domination, that has something to say about the coming of the Kingdom. It is listening, not demanding, that is at the heart of human obedience in a world not controlled by all whites, all males, all Westerners anymore. It is creation, not production and profit, that is at the heart of the gospel.

  Benedictine spirituality, then, is first and foremost a practical way to live the good news of the gospel today.

  This society is a complex, consumer society; we can be simple. We can reverence creation. We can refuse to have one thing more than we need. We can refuse to hoard one thing we can give away We can refuse to keep anything we are not using. We can give one thing away for every one thing we receive.

  This society is very ambitious and frantic for its own ends. We can be stable. We can use our own lives to indicate that some things—our relationships to one another, the search for God, the meaning of life—never change.

  This society exploits. It breaks the backs of sugar workers; it destroys farm workers; it wipes out the working person; it discards the middle-aged and forgets the elderly. We can minister to the world by calling for justice.

  This society dominates and is selfish and has its own goals as the inner force of its life. We can be community We can say by our lives that there are times when it is important for us to step back in life so that others can gain.

  This society depends on power. We can practice the power of the powerless who show us all how little it really takes to live, how rich life is without riches, how strong are those who cannot be owned, how clear is the gospel about the rights of the poor. We can be the voice of those who are not heard and the hands of those who have no bread and the families of those who are alone and the strength of those who are weak. We can be the sign of human community.

  Finally, this society is anxious and angry and noisy. We can be contemplative. In the midst of chaos, if the Scripture is in our hearts, if we are faithful to lectio, if we build the Jesus-life in our own souls, we can see God where God is. Everywhere.

  Those are the new asceticisms and those are the new graces and those are the new revelations of God in our day. Those, then, must become the way we express faith in our times. Those are the dust and breath of the new spirituality. Those are the elements of Benedictine vision that saved the Western world over the centuries again and again and again. And they can save us from ourselves once more. Benedictine spirituality does not call for spiritual athletes; Benedictine spirituality calls for spiritual giants who know that God is in our dailiness, calling us and converting us to a vision far beyond our own.

  It is the ancients who may best explain the process and the substance of Benedictine spirituality:

  “Where shall I look for Enlightenment?” the disciple asked.

  “Here,” the elder said.

  “When will it happen?” the disciple wanted to know.

  “It is happening right now,” the elder said.

  “Then why don’t I experience it?” the disciple asked.

  And the elder answered, “Because you do not look.”

  “But what should I look for?” the disciple wanted to know.

  And the elder smiled and answered, “Nothing. Just look.”

  “But at what?” the disciple insisted.

  “Anything your eyes alight upon,” the elder continued.

  “Well, then, must I look in a special kind of way?” the disciple said.

  “No,” the elder said.

  “Why ever not?” the disciple persisted.


  And the elder said quietly, “Because to look you must be here. The problem is that you are mostly somewhere else.”

  In each of those insights may lie the spirit of Benedictine spirituality.

  Spirituality has seldom been a major topic in the average theology curriculum or even the greatest concern of the ecclesiastical community. What the classics said prayer was, prayer was. What the formulas said was how God was to be found, was how God was to be found. For everybody. At all times. And especially for the laity who were clearly to be the consumers, not the providers, of religion or spiritual exercises or spiritual direction. But the Rule of Benedict requires that we set down and describe for ourselves in what ways God is most real and present in our lives, with or without formulas, with or without the standard images and exercises.

  The ascetic, the mystical, even the liturgical streams of spirituality all seem to presuppose the building of sacred bridges from here to there. But Benedictine spirituality says that God is in the fabric of our worn lives: not in incense and purple so much, it seems, as in people and places that make the Word of God alive by touching our worlds in immediate ways. God acts through others, a communal spirituality declares. God acts in the now. God is here.

  There is a great deal of emphasis in Benedictine spirituality on taking time for God and on preparing the mind and heart for the presence of God. But there is equal emphasis on the consciousness that God happens when God happens, and that that is not necessarily on schedule.

  For people whose lives are overfull of others and too often devoid of time for self, even in prayer, the disciple’s question, “When will it happen?” is often the question that leads beyond despair to emptiness. But no one ever took much time to lift that guilt or mend that feeling of brokenness in the soul. God was something that happened to cloistered contemplatives, or to monastics in general, or at least to religious, or surely to priests. The worker-bee types—the laity, the mothers, the fathers with two jobs, the secretaries—went to church on Sunday, did their Easter duty, said their novenas, and waited for heaven. In the meantime, God consorted intimately with different types. But Benedictine spirituality calls everyone to see the sanctity of who they are and what they do, the porter as well as the priest in the community, the table server as well as the prioress, the last in rank as well as the abbot.

  The nineteenth century spiritual writer de Caussade talked a great deal about the sacrament of the present moment, and certainly the psalmists walked with God through the dailiness of life. For the most part, though, contemplation was considered a great deal more difficult than that: something to be studied and exercised. But then you read the Rule of Benedict with its attention to humility and listening and simple stewardship as the cornerstones of sanctity and you get the distinct impression, with the ancient elder, that what has been the popular currency of the spiritual life may also, indeed, have been counterfeit.

  When God has become a business, though, it is very hard for people to get the confidence to realize that God is really a personal God, a God who touches us as individuals, a God who is as close to us as we choose to see. We have learned well the remoteness of a God who lived for so long behind communion rails and altar steps and seminary doors and chancery desks that the experience of God, however strong, has always been more private secret than public expectation.

  For most people, the talents they have must be pointed out by others for them to realize there is something in themselves worth developing. The spiritual life is hardly any different. How do we know if we even have a spirituality if no one ever asks and no one ever invites us to lend our secrets? Like the musician who never learned to play, or the artist who never took drawing lessons, or the writer who has never been read, a person whose spiritual life goes unrecognized never learns to trust the gift themselves. Benedictine spirituality calls us to share our spiritual lives together, to nurture them together, and to learn from one another When someone is having a hard time understanding the ways of God in life, the Rule says, send a wise and prudent person to help them work the thing through (RB 27:2–3). Reveal all the thoughts of your heart to the abbot, the Rule instructs, so that what is unworthy can be dashed against the Rock that is Christ before it grows up to scar the spirit (RB 4:50).

  There is nothing easier in spirituality than to lead people down the path of prayer forms without ever asking them what goes on inside of them as a result. At the end, consequently, it is possible to get a praying person; it is not always possible to get a spiritual person. Praying people get their prayers in and wait for God somehow miraculously to deliver them from their private demons. Spiritual people expect the demons. What they look for is a way to find God even there. The Rule of Benedict tells us to accept our personal weaknesses, to see them as the road to humility and community, to stay the course no matter the tide.

  “Learn to see what you’re looking at and then say what you see,” a wise old professor told me once. That advice, the elder seems to indicate, holds for the spiritual life as well. Learning to look at our worlds as if they were really made by God, as if God were really in them now, as if God were calling to us from the other side of every event and situation is different from rushing about trying to find God somewhere else. But learning to look is so difficult in a culture that is highly technological and intent on fixing what is not broken. Nothing is ever good enough here. What might be is always so much more important to us than what is. And so the Presence becomes a distant possibility rather than a personal reality. But Benedictine spirituality says that the Now is holy and full of God and to be savored and suffused with the consciousness of the God of time.

  And what are we to concentrate on to find God? Arc we to look at the God of the theology books? Are we to look at the God held in bondage by the males of the Church? Are we to concentrate on the God of the syllogisms and the schools of philosophy? Are we to look only at the male father figure who has no woman in him? Or is there someplace deep in ourselves where a God of greater dimensions, with all gender and with no gender at all, seeps out to cloak the entire world in life and goodness? Benedictine spirituality says that to find God we must all find the feminine parts of ourselves in obedient listening and a community of relationships and the power of humility. Benedictine spirituality says that God is where I am. More than that, it implies, God is where you are. But those are hard words for the rationalists, for the secularists, for the chauvinists, for those with no self, no self-worth, no self-esteem, no self-identity.

  Indeed, the how-does-one-become-holy question is as old as the Exodus and the answers are just as varied: keep the laws; go up the mountain; walk with God; do not worship idols, follow the cloud by day and the fire by night. But not everybody did all those things. And not everyone did any of them the same way. They were a motley—but a chosen—people. For centuries we have been following the lights of others. The Rule of Benedict says that we must learn to follow our own call, our own lives, to find what is sanctifying for us.

  Real spiritual wisdom knows that God is unique to every unique being. Real spiritual wisdom knows that spirituality is not packaged and not processed and not produced for the mass market. Real spirituality is something that brings us now in touch with God here. It does not take formulas or imprimaturs. It takes consciousness.

  The easy way out, of course, is to take the package deal. To let religious formulas substitute for spirituality. To allow others to digest our God for us. The valiant thing, the committed thing, the graced thing, is to believe that we ourselves are good enough to contain God for ourselves. But we have all been taught differently from that. We have all been taught, whoever we are, that God is just a notch beyond and above and unlike ourselves. It is time to find out where God really is for us.

  Once upon a time, the story goes, a preacher ran through the streets of the city shouting, “We must put God into our lives. We must put God into our lives.” And hearing him, an old monastic rose up in the city plaza to say, “No, sir, you are wrong. You see,
God is already in our lives. Our task is simply to recognize that.”

  It is to the recognition of God in our own lives that the Rule of Benedict calls us.

  Appendix: Benedictinism,

  Its Foundation and Rule

  Benedictinism is the most influential form of cenobitic religious life in the Western world. Men and women who devoted themselves to the spiritual life before the time of Benedict of Nursia in 480 C.E. did so largely as hermits or as disciples gathered around a spiritual guide. Benedict, though, drew disciples together into stable groups whose spirituality depended as much on their relationship to one another as it did on their deference to their abbot. The effect was to create a sense of the social as well as the private dimension of the spiritual life.

  The Rule of Benedict is one of the oldest living documents in the Western world. It was written in sixth-century Italy and has been used as a spiritual guide in the Western world for nearly fifteen hundred years. Thousands of women and men around the world live by it still. More than that, thousands of lay people, Benedictine Oblates and Associates, Roman Catholic and Anglican, in every country are even today attempting to refocus their own lives and private worlds around the values of this ancient Rule.

  The problem is that unless people stumble on to it through associations with Benedictines themselves, the Rule is hardly accessible to the public except through academic or historical studies. The text itself, though short—less than a hundred small pages in any format— and simple to read, is also obscured by its language and development. Very few people, for instance, can read chapter seven of the Rule of Benedict, “On Humility,” in this day and age and make sense out of it. This book is an attempt to make the Rule accessible to the laity of our own times.

  To do that, it is important to understand a little of the history and the structure of the Rule.