Lessons from Monasticism, part 2 - Order

Eveything will be done at the proper time.
-Rule of St. Benedict

The other day I went out and purchased a new book. Not an odd thing for me to be doing, really, except that this book was a bit outside of my usual reading. As I toted home my new copy of Auto Repair for Dummies, I felt a mix of excitement and nervousness. The most I knew about my car was that it ran, generally. And that I should feed it gasoline and oil so that it would keep running. But beyond this, I had no conception of maintaining my car.

As I've read through the book, I have been confronted with one great truth: it is only by grace that my car runs at all. Over and over again I've seen the words: "This should be changed every 3,000 miles." Or the like. And scratching my head, I've wondered, "Has this been changed ever since I came to college?" Air filter? Brake fluid? Coolant? My car has a radiator?

But the horror of recognizing the terrible life I have imposed on my car has been mixed with the sweet realization that most of this is entirely within my power. Yesterday I changed the oil, and it was easy. What has kept me from doing the same with other parts of my car?

Well, partially ignorance. I really had no idea that cars needed to be maintained, other than washing the exterior. But more is involved in keeping a car maintained. That is, I need a plan. I need to have decided ahead of time that once a month I'll take a look and see that I have washer fluid, examine the wires, belts, filters, etc. I need to kick the tires and check the oil level. But aside from a set plan, this won't happen. I am far too content with the fact that my car presently gets from A to B, to check whether it will continue to do so tomorrow.

This same lesson is a key, central consideration of monasticism. Benedict devotes 13 chapters to a precise (and intense) detailing of daily prayers, and similar scrutiny is given to even the mundane, like the care of tools, the serving of food, the reception of guests. Every area of monastic life is considered; but surprisingly, Benedict does not give rigid rules. His suggestions for the psalmody, for instance, is strongly encouraged, but he ends by saying,

Above all else, we urge that if people find this distribution of psalms unsatisfactory, they should arrange whatever they judge better, provided that the full complement of one-hundred and fifty psalms is by all means maintained each week.

Notice two things here. First, the point is not mindlessly following Benedict's order—one is free to rearrange. But secondly, if the point is not to follow someone else's order without thought, neither is it to have no order. Benedict does not lay out his rule with an iron fist, demanding that every monastery everywhere conform to his exact specifications. He is too wise, too aware of the need for flexibility in human circumstances. But this does not mean that we yield to whatever comes our way; rather, we set an order for our lives that works for where we are.

The monastic is aware that time is rolling relentlessly forward, and that unless one takes great care to order their time it will escape from them, wasted. Kathleen Norris captures this well:

In our culture, time can seem like an enemy: it chews us up and spits us out with appalling ease. But the monastic perspective welcomes time as a gift from God, and seeks to put it to good use rather than allowing us to be used up by it.
- The Cloister Walk

Well-said. But before I leave this topic, I want to offer one last caution: the monastic, and the Christian in general, cannot merely orient their life toward getting things done. To complete tasks is one thing, and fine so far as it goes. But most of us have faced the appalling terrible silence at the completion of a tremendous task: Did that even matter? Now what? For, of course, to get something done is not to get anything done at all. Serving in the ministry has made me deeply aware of this. Not a single goal under my job description can ever be completed. "Equipping saints for the work of ministry"--just what would have to happen for me to clap my hands together and say, "Well, now that's done with! On to the next task!"

Benedict doesn't direct us to order our lives so that we can be productive; he calls for order because it is how we will develop a life of a certain character.

To return to my car-repair: certainly I've done a number of tasks on my car, and even learned many things about how my car works. But of course, having changed my oil this weekend is not to have maintained my car. Were I never to change the oil again, I would find my car coming to a (literally) grinding halt before too long. Maintaing my car is an endless task (until, that is, the Green machine gives up the ghost. But there will be, I suppose, another and hopefully less green car following it).

So the task before me is not to do a mere oil change - it is to order my life such that there are many oil changes, many air filter replacements, many monthly under-the-hood inspections.

Likewise, Benedict wants us to order our time with prayer, work, hospitality and reading so that our lives are characterized by these activities in an ongoing way. One is not going to complete the task of being prayerful; one is prayerful so long as one is praying. And thus we cannot leave the activities up to chance. We cannot leave our lives at the mercy of our daily whims. We have to decide what our lives are to be about, and then create the time for these things purposefully.

Kathleen Norris continues:

Liturgical time is essentially poetic time, oriented toward process rather than productivity, willing to wait attentively in silence rather than always pushing to "get the job done."
-The Cloister Walk

Protestants would be well-served to remember this; too many times we are plagued with fear and doubt during the times of seeming inproductive stillness that God imposes on us from time to time, when He seems to withdraw or we are held back from growth by our sin or circumstances. We want to get the job done; let's get this sanctification thing over with.

On the contrary, Benedict assumes it will take many, many years for us to really even approach the goal we aspire towards. And so our task is to order our time so that we can pay attention to the things that matter and wait. Eventually, if our life is characterized by seeking the face of God, we will find ourselves beholding it, and transfomed.

A brave new world...

... of car repair. Today I fixed some fuses in my car, all by myself, and now have a radio again.

This is not impressive. But I'm pleased with myself. Congratulations, me.

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.

Trinity Sunday

"Of the Father’s love begotten, ere the worlds began to be,
He is Alpha and Omega, He the source, the ending He,
Of the things that are, that have been,
And that future years shall see, evermore and evermore!

"O that birth forever blessèd, when the virgin, full of grace,
By the Holy Ghost conceiving, bare the Savior of our race;
And the Babe, the world’s Redeemer,
First revealed His sacred face, evermore and evermore!

"Christ, to Thee with God the Father, and, O Holy Ghost, to Thee,
Hymn and chant with high thanksgiving, and unwearied praises be:
Honor, glory, and dominion,
And eternal victory, evermore and evermore!"

--Of the Father's Love Begotten, 5th Century Latin hymn


"The Father is the deity subsisting in the prime, unoriginated and most absolute manner, or the deity in its direct existence. The Son is the deity [eternally] generated by God's understanding, or having an idea of Himself and subsisting in that idea. The Holy Ghost is the deity subsisting in act, or the divine essence flowing out and breathed forth in God's infinite love to and delight in Himself. And . . . the whole Divine essence does truly and distinctly subsist both in the Divine idea and Divine love, and that each of them are properly distinct persons."

--Jonathan Edwards, "Essay on the Trinity"