Lessons from Monasticism, Part 1

"To have a place to stand is a basic human need in order that I know where I belong, and it is necessary both in relation to the places and to the people in my life. It means, above all, that I have time and space for listening to the Word of God in all the many ways that God is reaching out to me. That will be totally impossible if I am always running, late, distracted, feeling ajar and torn apart. Benedict is helping me to find my own center...."
-- Esther De Waal, A Life-Giving Way

A few years ago, if you had asked me what I thought of monasticism, my response would have been one of vague disapproval. Vague, because I knew next to nothing about the matter. Disapproving, because I had gleaned from my Protestant upbringing an (again vague) uneasiness towards all things Catholic, and also because the few examples of monasticism I had seen in the media were decidedly negative. (A recent example: the murderously obedient monk of Opus Dei in Dan' Brown's The DaVinci Code, which is as inaccurate in its portrayal of monasticism as it is in its historical critique of the Church.)

And, even more, I was dimly aware that the Protestant Reformers themselves angrily dismissed the evils of monastic life! (And how could they possibly be wrong?) Indeed, it is true that Luther wrote viciously against the monastic forms as he found them in the sixteenth century. To become a monk, he wrote, was the same as to reject salvation:

"To become a monk (unless one is saved by a miracle) is to become apostate from the faith, to deny Christ..."
"For they teach justification and salvation by works, and depart from faith. They not only think that their obedience, poverty, and chastity are certain roads to salvation, but that their ways are more perfect and better than those of the rest of the faithful."

And so on. Given my sympathy with Reformation theology, how could I truck about with people who "depart from faith," which alone justifies? I would have been hard pressed to express anything good about monasticism. It seemed like an escape route, to get away from the world and pursue legalistic self-righteousness.

It amuses me, then, to see how my vision has changed so dramatically in such little time. Beginning with my introduction to Iris Murdoch—who helped me to understand the important of paying attention and of character formation—and then through exposure to Dallas Willard, Richard Foster and many others who encouraged me toward spiritual disciplines, I began to catch a vision of a new kind of life. This life would not be enslaved to the whims of the moment but, by submitting to discipline would be freed to pursue real value. By abstaining from many pleasures it would whet an appetite for God. By ordering time rigorously, it would be released into deeply spontaneous worship and kindness. And by closing the door on many opportunities and choices it would learn to pay attention to Christ. This life would be about beholding the glory of God in the face of Christ—and training the whole self to pay Him attention. Out of that would flow worship, love, and obedience.

Imagine my surprise, then, when I found that the life I was describing was really the life St. Benedict laid out in his Rule for monastics. For 1400 years the Rule has guided Benedictine monks in the pursuit of an ordered life which makes, in the words of Esther de Waal, "time and space for listening to the Word of God in all the many ways that God is reaching out to me."

Monasticism is, according to Benedict, a life spent resisting our tendency to "drift through the sloth of disobedience," and instead lived to "prepare our hearts and our bodies for the battle of holy obedience to God's instructions." (From the Prologue to the Rule.) It is the recognition that we must really do what the author of Hebrews counsels us: "Therefore we must pay attention to what we have heard, lest we drift away from it."

Far from being a necessary channel of legalism, monasticism flourishes when it is lived out of a proper sense of the magnitude of grace. But we in the Protestant church have long despised tradition, formalism and discipline, preferring instead a freewheeling spontaneity and off-the-cuff emoting. We fear works-righteousness so much that we are afraid to practice the life Jesus calls us to, instead waiting for it to descend on us from above, fully formed.

Over the next few posts I plan to share insights from Benedict's rule (and other monastics, as well as outsiders looking in) which have been encouraging to me in my pursuit of a vision of Christ. My hope is that, as we re-discover some very old wisdom on the Christian life, we will find that it does not clash with but instead breathes fresh life and fuller meaning into our Protestant doctrine.