I met a lot of Benedictines, from my community and others. Outside the cloister, guests tended to receive a show of preternatural serenity from the monastics. Inside the cloister, this behavior evaporated as if everyone took their monastics habit off when away from public scrutiny.
It slowly dawned that Benedictine life had not brought these folks anywhere in particular. They weren’t good or bad, but just ordinary, indistinguishable from everyone else. A few took seriously the call to grow in humility. Many paid little attention to monastic practices, caught up in everyday fears, ambitions and desires.
Because I spent a lot of time at the monastery before I entered the community, I knew the sisters were little different from the rest of us. Fear, anger or prejudice ruled them on occasion, just as such passions sometimes ruled me. I thought that was a good thing. We were all beginners, as Benedict expected for those who used his Rule. We could support each other as we walked side-by-side on the same road. The older sisters had spent more time walking it and so could offer advice from their struggles. I looked forward to hearing how they managed the journey. Even though I knew I'd resist, I looked forward getting help looking at myself.
Most of us have a hard time holding a mirror up to ourselves - taking a searching and fearless moral inventory (in the words of AA) that honestly lists both our actual weaknesses and our actual strengths. Like in AA, this is a necessary monastic step. Like in AA, we need the support of peers traveling the road with us. Monastic community is supposed to offer this. As Benedict says, we learn, out of love, to support with the greatest patience each other's weaknesses of body and personality. In that way everyone draws closer to God.
So it wasn't a shock to discover that under the hyper-monastic habits the sisters wore for guests, lived some very ordinary women. What hurt was discovering that the older sisters thought they'd already reached the pinnacle of monastic wisdom. They were "free of ego," and so needed to do no further work on themselves. Even an inadvertent challenge to this view of their achievement could not be tolerated.
How did the monastic promise fall so far short? How could people so easily twist it to support self-indulgence?
12-step programs are a very effective way to gain serenity, which is also the promise of monasticism. In both, we give up the illusion that we are in control. In exchange we gain knowledge and acceptance of our actually weaknesses and strengths.
All the parts of monasticism - from the insights of the old desert hermits to Benedict - are present in the 12 steps and 12 traditions. They are just cut up and rearranged. But Benedictine monasticism has one glaring difference. The monastery is a strict dictatorship. 12-step programs are insistently non-hierarchical, non-organized peer groups. The experience of peers provides a teaching resource, but the only authority is one's own Higher Power.
Benedictines are hardly the only group to found monastic practice on a dictatorial authority. Yet the problems with this approach are all too clear in the arrogance that was the downfall of the sisters I knew. The effectiveness of a non-hierarchical, unprofessional approach is equally clear in the success of 12-step programs in bringing people along the monastic road. But those in 12 step programs mostly go home to their separate lives after meetings. They are not trying to create an enduring, economically-interdependent family, such as is a monastery.
Is there a functional middle ground between these that would foster monastic community?
I do apologize for the Sisters at the Benedictine Monastery in Wisconsin, which we have both frequented. Since my last visit there I have given much thought with respect to how the monastery has changed and the community.
ReplyDeleteWhen I first visited, the place was rich with the Spirit. Now as some would say the ground is cold.
Even during a spiritual direction session the sister I met with got it all wrong. Her idea of spiritual direction was one of telling me how awful I was, she doesn't even know me. Their were no words of edification or wisdom. A total waste of time and money. I also endured mocking because of my vocation as a publicly professed hermit nun, which in the eyes of these women is considered less.
What is really sad, they have no idea how far off the tracks they have gone. They behave as if they know it all and unless something changes, all they know is all they will ever know.
I always sensed I was being watched. When one of the Oblates informed me, "you better be careful, they are watching you, don't try to put anything over on these women." My only offence was being a person of color. The fact that MD's niece is married to an African-American is not a reflection of their own (non-inclusive) heart as touted by these women.
The statement was made, 'we are a community of five women". Interesting spin. We all know that this is a community of three women. The third was added after 40 years! They do offer hospitality to visiting nuns, e.g. sabbatical nuns. We know how St. Benedict feels about murmuring, a lot of that goes on. Work the Rule.
I am thankful for the hole in the habit. That hole revealed everything I needed to move forward in ministering to God's beautiful mosaic. No doubt I am in even greater solidarity with the disenfranchised and my ministry reflects that compassion and love for least among us.
Please spend not a minute more in tending the very real wounds inflicted by these women. Look for the need in our world and tend to it. Your monastery without walls is one way. I still feel a Rule is needed to hinge the community.
Of course --- 12-step programs are capable of being very dysfunctional as well. And my adverse knee-jerk reaction to the Benedictine call for people to be oh so obedient to superiors is augmented by many factors - but one of those factors is my bad experience with sponsors.
ReplyDeleteFor example, some sponsors have put lots of pressure on me to go to more meetings, more meetings, and more meetings --- despite the fact that I was in a Bible-belt area and am transsexual --- at the time I was pre-op as a matter of fact. Let me tell you one thing --- if you're a pre-op transsexual and try to fill an excessive quota of meetings when you live in the Bible Belt, you are *asking* for trouble - and when I asked, I *did* receive -- and received it in abundance.
Now there are even some places, to this day, *other* than AA club-houses that I do not feel safe going to due to the bad-blood that exists from when I obeyed my sponsor during my AA days.