On Community

Today is the principal feast (at least among the Benedictines) of Saint Benedict of Nursia, author of the great monastic rule that in large part saved western civilization after the fall of the Roman Empire.

Pope Benedict XVI took his name at least in part from Saint Benedict, and the life and work of the saint was a topic that he spoke on with eloquence:

Benedict did not found a monastic institution oriented primarily to the evangelization of barbarian peoples, as other great missionary monks of the time, but indicated to his followers that the fundamental, and even more, the sole objective of existence is the search for God: “Quaerere Deum.”

Even so, it was his spiritual children who, by the example of their life of contemplative prayer and physical labour, did more to affect those conversions than anyone else.

Saint Benedict died in the mid sixth century, and what little we know about his life comes from Pope Gregory the Great’s Dialogues, written in about 593.

We can glean quite a bit of his personality from the Rule, however. The saint comes across as moderate but not lax: someone constantly exhorting his monks to do more, but mindful of their all-too-human weaknesses.

One of the more popular essays on this site talked about Saint Benedict and the idea of reform, monastic and otherwise.

Some of the issues (particularly with the English liturgical translations) in “Towards a New Cluny” are now somewhat dated, but the central thesis holds: the reform we had in the 1970s does not conform to what the Council fathers wanted, nor to the historical understanding of what “reform” actually is: restoration.

Forty years on, we’re slowly figuring it out; save the liturgy, save the world!

The proof is in the rapid growth of traditional monasticism in the past decade, both in the United States and in Europe. I pointed out numerous examples back in March.

The fact that it’s the more traditional threads of monasticism that are doing well speaks highly of the tradition, but the fact that monasticism is doing well at all in the 21st century speaks to a deeper human need that isn’t being met in the culture at large.

An Amateur Monk

What, dearest brethren, can be sweeter to us than this voice of the Lord inviting us? See, in His loving kindness, the Lord showeth us the way of life.

(Rule of Saint Benedict, prologue)

The name of this blog is a dead giveaway of my affinity for monasticism. For most of my life, even before I was Catholic, I felt the call of the monastery.

Of course, I also felt the call to married life, and these two vocations are not traditionally compatible.

While we can answer the Benedictine call to contemplative prayer and to meaningful work, the community portion of that call is a little trickier.

Francine and I did become Oblates at Saint Martin’s Abbey in Lacey back in 2006. Unfortunately, time and distance make our physical presence there a rarity.

And I have to say that the design of the chapel there makes it challenging for me to pray there. It’s modernist and ugly. Once I close my eyes and just listen, I’m fine. Maybe that’s the point.

There were several monastic experiences on our Camino, from my first night in Spain praying with the monks of Roncesvalles to the sublime experience of praying Vespers in choir with the Benedictine monks of Rabanal.

Perhaps the most emotionally affecting, however, was the overwhelming feeling as we walked through the great cloister at Samos that I was made for the monastery.

Where do you go from there? I still don’t know.

One way I tried to tackle it this year was to observe a “monastic Lent“. As much as I could, I tried to follow the monastic hours for prayer and work. As I rapidly found out, even my heavily modified and simplified version was virtually impossible in the modern, post-industrial world in which we live and work.

It certainly doesn’t help that I’m out of the house for twelve hours a day at work and commuting to and from same.

I had no trouble with Prime and Compline. After abandoning our spotty attempts to pray in community at home, Vespers could usually be worked out on the train coming home. As for the rest?

After trying numerous methods of reminding and scheduling, at the end of Lent I was still finding it virtually impossible to juggle with the needs of my job. The monastery may not make the monk, but it certainly helps.

And not just the place – as Saint Benedict lays out so plainly in the Rule, for most of us spiritual beginners, the community itself is indispensable.

Community

The workshop in which we perform all these [spiritual] works with diligence is the enclosure of the monastery, and stability in the community.

(Rule of Saint Benedict, ch. iv)

The community is required for the weaker of us – and for all of us in our days (and weeks and years) of weakness. The community of monks that make up a monastery can and should confirm and encourage the brethren.

The fact is, I don’t live in community. I live in a marriage, which is a whole different animal. My bride is the love of my life. She is in turns both delightful and supportive, but she doesn’t fulfill the role of a community of brethren – nor should she.

Husband and wife must of course encourage each other to holiness; it really is my job to make sure she gets to heaven.

And certainly, you could make a very cogent argument that the early medieval monasteries modeled the ideal of the Christian family in the midst of the pagan milieu of post-Roman Europe. That single fact was probably responsible for more and deeper conversions than any preaching or teaching over the course of a thousand years.

But no two people, even two people “of one flesh”, can by themselves be a community.

The surprisingly intelligent “Art of Manliness” blog has a great essay on communities versus networks. This, more than anything else, made me realize that not only do I not live in community in the monastic sense, I don’t even really live in a community in the social sense.

My neighbourhood comes close. My parish comes closer. Neither really fits the definition.

The one has the advantage of a geographic center, the other of a spiritual center, but they both fall short.

The circle of my friends also comes close, though here again it’s challenged by issues of geographic and spiritual dispersion.

I am certainly not alone in this lack of community. It is probably one of the greatest issues facing western civilization right now.

If that sounds alarmist and shrill, well perhaps it is. The fact is that most people in the post-industrial urban west live in cities that by their very nature promote anonymity and isolation.

The culture of the Internet and what one writer memorably called the Distraction-Industrial Complex certainly doesn’t help matters.

We are being socialized not to be part of a community, but rather to be isolated individuals. Individuals with empathy and sympathy perhaps, individuals in networks certainly, but ultimately individuals.

Unfortunately, civilization itself is built from the blocks of communities, communities that build layer upon layer larger and larger human social structures from the ground up. Without those communities, and without the daily practice of being part of a community, civilization itself starts to get brittle.

I think we’re seeing that now, as our politics and our culture fracture into increasingly tinier and sharper shards.

Reboot

Let no one follow what he thinketh useful to himself, but rather to another.

(Rule of Saint Benedict, ch. lxxii)

Recently, I saw a short film about the monks at Clear Creek. It’s only about four minutes long, and it’s well worth watching.

Here’s the thing that struck me: Clear Creek is following the medieval model exactly. A village is growing up around them.

Why? I think the answer is obvious. They’re providing a geographic and a spiritual center for a true community.

They are answering that deep human need that modern urban society is by and large failing to answer.

The video says that “the monks preach through the radical and evangelical witness of their very lives”.

It goes on to quote Bishop Edward Slattery’s homily at the February 2000 inauguration Mass. Here’s the slightly longer version:

That radical witness which you are called to give is what we mean by evangelization, but there can be no true evangelization without contemplation; and, as Pope John Paul [II] reminds us, contemplation is the very heart of Benedictine life. Thus we who are in the world to evangelize it for Christ will depend upon the monks of this house in a way far more complete than perhaps any of its members may suspect. …

In the same way, the monk … will be the principal evangelizer of our communities; and from the marvelous and wholly divine arrangement by which those in the world are supported by those in the cloister, and those in the cloister are engaged in the most vital work imaginable in the world today, a new American civilization will be born, a civilization of love, rooted in contemplation and alive with the holiness of God.

Beloved members of the family of Saint Benedict, believe me when I tell you that from this house a new civilization will spring. Let it be intensely Benedictine, joyfully Benedictine, Benedictine in the very center of its search for God.

The good bishop seems to be saying that the monasteries rebooted western civilization once before, and they can do so again.

From the bottom. From individuals becoming communities based on love.

Raise up, O Lord, in your Church the spirit,
with which our Holy Father Saint Benedict was animated,
that, being filled with the same spirit,
we may learn to love what he loved
and put into practice what he taught.

Through Christ our Lord, Amen.