{Practicing Benedict} The Finale: A Beginning

May 16, 2012 By michaboyett 12 Comments

The purpose for which we have written this rule is to make it clear that by observing it in our monasteries we can at least achieve the first steps in virtue and good monastic practice. Anyone, however, who wished to press on towards the highest standards of monastic life may turn to the teachings of the holy Fathers, which can lead those who follow them to the very heights of perfection. Indeed, what page, what saying from the sacred scriptures of the Old and New Testaments is not given us by the authority of God as reliable guidance for our lives on earth? … We, however, can only blush with shame when we reflect on the negligence and inadequacy of the monastic lives we lead.

Whoever you may be, then, in your eagerness to reach your Father’s home in heaven, be faithful with Christ’s help to this small Rule which is only a beginning. Starting from there you may in the end aim at the greater heights of monastic teaching and virtue in the works which we have mentioned above and with God’s help you will then be able to reach those heights yourself. Amen.

-The Rule of St. Benedict, Chapter 73 (emphasis mine)

 

I have this memory of sitting at my computer during August’s naptime six weeks into our move to San Francisco. I had just spent the first 45 minutes of his nap building an Ikea desk. I did it backwards the first time and had to take it apart. Then, I drilled and grunted and propped that delicate fake-wood into its proper settings and set that cheap table on its feet. I placed two things upon it: my computer and my Benedictine Handbook.

Then I opened the screen to check in with my writerly friends from grad school. We were a group of women who had spent Thursday nights together throughout those three years in the early 2000’s. We’d get dinner and talk poetry while drinking tea. We had a little closed blog back then where we would post about what we were reading or writing. My friends were publishing books and teaching writing workshops and writing interesting essays on poetry and feminism. And I was wiping my kid’s butt. Not reading. And definitely not writing.

That afternoon, I opened the laptop to see a thread from a friend about her stressful life situation. She was struggling through an incredibly difficult season: unsure of the future of her marriage, trying to find a permanent teaching position, balancing her writing and her adjunct jobs and raising a toddler. She made a statement in her frustration. She said, “If only I could be some Stepford Wife and let somebody else take care of me!”

That’s all she said. She didn’t purposefully make fun of me. She was hurting and I was the selfish one. And you better believe I cried for myself. I sat at that new Ikea desk, my face smashed into the white plastic wood, and cried. I wept and asked God, “Is that all I am? Am I a lazy wife who lets my husband earn the money and take care of me? Am I useless? Am I wasting my gifts here in my home, washing the dishes and playing on the floor with my kid, making grilled cheese sandwiches?”

I had only just then begun my journey with St. Benedict. I was asking God to show me how to find purpose in this life at home. I was asking God how I was supposed to feel like this staying home business had any value compared to the work I had been in full time ministry just months before. I was looking at myself and my days alone with August and my loneliness in this new city, and I was gut-sobbing, “Please God, give me some help here. I don’t know where the joy is.”

And do you know how God used St. Benedict in my life? God began to daily lift up that veil where I was hiding my Crazy. Slowly, I heard words and phrases like: humility, stability, obedience, hospitality, heartfelt repentance, hurrying to the work of God, the spirit of silence, sincere and unassuming affection, prayer that should normally be short, words that are weighty and restrained…

* * *

Over time, I began to sense a change in my guts: It was a paradigm shift. It was as if I was, for the first time, actually believing Jesus when he spoke of a new way of seeing value. What mattered was not my own power in the world, my own ability to provide for myself or impress strangers with my usefulness in life, or, even, to be entertained in my monotonous day. What mattered was that I had a miraculous invitation to join the servants of the Kingdom of God in the work of Jesus, the work that no one in their right minds wants to do. I had the opportunity to wash dishes with a song on my lips, to stare in utter gratitude at the tiny fingers stacking those wooden colored blocks, to clean and pick up and sing and rock and bandage ouchies and pick up again. I was learning to make a stable place for my son in the midst of our unstable life post cross-country move. I was honored to learn the glory of wholeheartedness, to grasp the miracle that my life did not have to be externally impressive to be significant in God’s kingdom.

And do you know what happened? I learned to pray at that desk. Writing words on paper, leaning over my copy of Benedict’s Rule with sticky notes on the wall in front of me that said things like, “Count nothing more important than the love you should cherish for Christ,” (RSB, chapter 4) and “Humility is very slow business, if it’s authentic” (Michael Casey, Guide to Living in the Truth, via Monk Habits for Everyday People by Dennis Olkham).

I have learned a secret, whispered to me via Holy Spirit over the long, long path of 1500 years. It’s a secret truth that God whsipered in the scripture first, a secret I needed a friend like Benedict to speak louder so it broke through all that flesh, so it pebble-sank into my heart:

“In repentance and rest is your salvation, in quietness and trust is your strength…” (Isaiah 30:15)

Oh, friend, “whoever you may be,” may we be eager to run toward the full hearts God has always intended for us. May we quiet the voices spouting every kind of lie to our already bare-threaded souls. When we hear the words that tear our patched up psyches, may we learn the gift of gratitude and grace, and embrace those moments when we learn to give, when we learn to serve the least among us. May we find in them Christ. May we remember that “with Christ’s help” this “small Rule… is only a beginning.”

* * *

 

This is my last post in the {Practicing Benedict} series. Thanks for walking with me through it. I promise that Benedict will still be making some regular guest appearances around here and I’ll have a button up soon linking to every post in the series.

 

 

 

 

 

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{Practicing Benedict} The Good Spirit

May 9, 2012 By michaboyett 2 Comments

“It is easy to recognize the bitter spirit of wickedness which creates a barrier to God’s grace and opens the way to the evil of hell. But equally there is a good spirit which frees us from evil ways and brings us closer to God and eternal life. It is this latter spirit that all who follow the monastic way of life should strive to cultivate, spurred on by fervent love. By following this path they try to be first to show respect to one another with the greatest patience in tolerating weaknesses of body or character. They should even be ready to outdo each other in mutual obedience so that no one in the monastery aims at personal advantage but is rather concerned for the good of others. Thus the pure love of one another as of one family should be their ideal. As for God they should have a profound and loving reverence for him. They should love their abbot or abbess with sincere and unassuming affection. They should value nothing whatever above Christ himself and may he bring us all together to eternal life.”

-The Rule of St. Benedict, Chapter 72 (emphasis mine)

“It is easy to recognize the bitter spirit” because it always creates barriers. It creates barriers between me and my kids when I’m too busy to listen, when I’m too impatient to notice their needs. It creates barriers between me and the cashier when I’m too harried, too frustrated, too distracted to recognize that she needs a stranger to simply look her in the eye, recognize her value. It creates barriers between me and my husband because I forget he had a day of demands and excitement and frustration and wasn’t just away frolicking in grown-up land.

Mostly, the bitter spirit creates barriers between me and God because he is always in the work of giving and I am only able to notice when the walls are down between us. If I build up the barrier of bitterness, I can’t see anything. That’s when I miss the joy, that’s when I’m stuck in my own head and forget to notice that the world around me is on fire with goodness.

So, how do I fight the bitter spirit? What is St. Benedict saying to his monks about what it means to “cultivate” the “good spirit” that frees us from evil, that brings us to God? I love the image of cultivating. It’s so simple, so agrarian.

To cultivate, we break up the soil. We prepare our souls for God’s presence. I used to think that in order to prepare myself for God I had to confess every indiscretion I had possibly committed. I used to think there was no room in my messed up soul for God until I had worked hard to remove every fallacy. Then, I realized my sin was much deeper and more complicated than I ever could have understood. My bad motives were all mixed up with the good, my conscience was braided into my guilt. I couldn’t work hard enough to fix myself to make room for God. I needed grace.

So, if making space for God doesn’t mean doing surgery on my own sin, what does it mean? What does it mean to see myself as I really am and let grace work itself out in me?

I think maybe Benedict works backward here. It might be helpful for me to turn this around for us. Think of this as a cycle:

Valuing “nothing whatever above Christ himself” leads to having the “good spirit.” The good spirit leads to the possibility of “outdo[ing] each other in mutual obedience.” That leads patience in tolerating each other’s weaknesses, which leads to fervent love. Fervent love leads to “sincere and unassuming affection” for the one in authority over us. That sincerity and affection is a sign of the good spirit, a sign that Christ is valued above all else.  And it goes around and around in a cycle.

Cultivating isn’t just breaking up the ground, making space. It’s offering attention to the plant. It’s weeding out the things that want to take over the ground, bring destruction. It’s removing the pests who plan to eat from the fruit before it’s ready. It’s watering daily, pruning, waiting on the plant to absorb the sun’s good nutrition.

If we are to cultivate the “good spirit” in our lives. We cannot sit idly. We must make space. We must weed. We must battle it out with the pests. We must accept water, wait on the sunshine. All of that cultivation is work; but it is not lifeless striving. There is a difference between working to shape our souls into people who value nothing above Christ and living with great guilt over our failures, beating ourselves up and missing out on the joy of letting the sun soak in and change us.

The way of grace begins with Love. The way of guilt begins with shame.

How do we value nothing above Christ himself? We recognize daily in greater and greater amounts the dearnesss of Christ’s love for us. That love is our motivation to the hard work of weeding out what’s broken within us. That love is the motivation that allows us to tolerate first our own weaknesses and (once we have seen them and know how desperate we are for grace) tolerate the weaknesses of others in our lives. Then we can love fervently. Then we can care for the ones in authority over us. And then the cycle starts again.

We only have one more chapter of Benedict’s Rule to cover next week. For eight months we’ve been working our way through this centuries old manual for communal living and life-giving faith. And I feel like this is the question it comes down to: What are you cultivating? (What are you giving your time to? What are you making space for? What are you loving?)

God is calling us to cultivate: We make space for God through prayer, through intentionally paying attention to God at work around us. We allow God to show us our weaknesses and remove the brokenness from our lives. And we sit under God’s instruction in the scripture, in the mundane, in the community of people we’ve been given. We learn the sweetness of time and patience as God’s work plays itself out—as we grow into Christ: “rooted and built up in him and established in the faith…abounding in thanksgiving” (Colossians 1:7).

That’s when the “good spirit” begins to hover in our heads. That’s when we live more and more deeply into The Great Commandment. We love God with all our hearts, minds, souls and strength and out of that overflow; we love each other fervently, with sincerity, with affection.

Maybe someday I’ll arrive in that sweet spot of faith. And if you beat me there, will you be sure to show me the “greatest patience”?

Until then,

Micha

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{Practicing Benedict} Gentle Piety, Warm Charity

May 2, 2012 By michaboyett 21 Comments

At the entrance to the monastery there should be a wise senior who is too mature in stability to think of wandering about and who can deal with the enquiries and give whatever help is required. This official’s room should be near the main door so that visitors will always find someone there to greet them. As soon as anyone knocks on the door or one of the poor calls out, the response, uttered at once with gentle piety and warm charity, should be ‘thanks be to God’ or ‘your blessing, please’. If the porter or portress needs help, then a junior should be assigned this task. (The Rule of St. Benedict, Chapter 66)

I keep thinking about the words we speak and St. Benedict’s charge to the “porter or portress” of the monastery, that their words should be gently pious and full of warm charity. Those two requests, that notion of piety and charity? They’re totally not our style.

That’s not to say the Christian sub-culture isn’t full of piety. In fact, we love piety and have filled up books with every kind of Christian-y clichéd phrase so that we can most easily express our piety. (For more on those clichés, see my friend Addie Zierman’s blog). The problem with most piety is that it doesn’t get lived or spoken with gentleness. In fact, I would say that piety is such a charged word for me (and my generation) that if I heard something “pious” spoken with gentleness, pious would be the last thing I’d call it.

If we as a culture truly valued depth and stability and true kindness, we would change much of what we speak, especially what and how we speak about God.

We believers are rarely gentle with each other. When it comes to piety, we use our words to battle over theological stances, to speak judgment into each other’s circumstances. Moms battle over ideas of work and non work, sleep training and child rearing. We speak to each other at play dates with frantic worry. We speak with fearful, wandering minds.

And then, when we want to calm down, we speak with sarcastic snark. It’s like we don’t know how to be sincere anymore. All we know is how to battle, how to worry together, how to make fun of ourselves.

Of course, that’s a generalization. Of course, there are those who are kind, earnest, and sincere in their language. But there’s a reason Jon Stewart is the voice for our generation. We don’t know how to see the world except through the lens of the scoffer.

If I’m going to Practice Benedict, I need more than spiritual notions for my heart. I need to change the words I’m saying and how I say them. What does it mean to speak with gentleness? What are the walls that my sarcasm has built up in order to protect me from emotional and relational pain?

We all crave beauty. We all crave earnestness. I’m convinced we’re simply afraid of it. We’re afraid of piety because it has always been harsh. We’re afraid of speaking with charity because we don’t know how to convey warmth. Instead, we take the easy way out. We joke. One of the most beautiful things about Christianity is the high calling to live counter-culturally. What if we counter our culture by speaking true words with kindness?

Now is when I confess that I’m the severe sarcastic type. My humor is totally wrapped up in snarky remarks and I don’t see that changing any time soon. In fact, I’m not saying that I need to stop being sarcastic. But, I’m convicted by the thought that my first response is most often to make a joke instead of speak to the need in front of me.

What I want is to be the deep elder with a heart of stability.

What I want is to grow into the faithful one at the door waiting for the pilgrims. I want to live patiently aware so that as soon as anyone knocks on the door longing for a place to stay, a place to belong, a place where words are spoken that have weight and joy inside them, I will be brave enough to utter the good truth, to speak love with warmth and hold out piety with gentle hands.

 

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{Practicing Benedict} Compassion and Sober Judgment

April 25, 2012 By michaboyett 16 Comments

“The abbot or abbess, once established in office, must often think about the demands made on them by the burden they have undertaken and consider also to whom they will have to give an account of their stewardship. They must understand the call of their office is not to exercise power over those who are their subjects but to serve and help them in their needs. They must be well-grounded in the law of God so that they may have the resources to bring forth what is new and what is old in their teaching. They must be chaste, sober and compassionate and should always let mercy triumph over judgment in the hope of themselves receiving like treatment from the Lord. While they must hate all vice, they must love their brothers or sisters. In correcting faults they must act with prudence being conscious of the danger of breaking the vessel itself by attacking the rust too vigorously. They should always bear their own frailty in mind and remember not to crush the bruised reed.” (The Rule of St. Benedict, Chapter 64, emphasis mine)

There are a few things the past ten years have taught me about myself:

  1. Left to my own devices, my brain wants to devour itself and then complain about how bad it tastes.
  2. We are all weak. We are all capable inflicting great pain upon each other.
  3. I really believe that the Spirit of God brings healing. But healing doesn’t come easy; it requires self-honesty. And, usually, the self is the most difficult person with whom to have an honest conversation.

This past weekend I heard another story in the long tale of the broken Church. A friend explained how, during her divorce, she was no longer allowed to take communion in her church. It was a terrible time for her and instead of the church being a supportive place, it was a place of judgment and exclusion. It just so happens that while she was removed from the table, a founder of the church took communion weekly, all while secretly involved in a six-year extramarital affair. We are poor judges of each other.

“They should always bear their own frailty in mind…” What would happen if we actually recognized our own frailties and treated others’ weaknesses with a sober understanding of our own?

Correction in the church is rightfully a scary topic. We’ve all seen that process fail. We’ve all seen people in positions of authority dishing out rebukes while they’re the ones hiding the darkest secrets. Who is worthy to judge?

I keep thinking about this in terms of parenthood. (Shocker!) I’m asking myself how I know when I’m making the right call in terms of correcting my kids. I’m also asking myself when I most believe in the need for justice in the world. You know when? When the kid at the park is purposefully throwing sand in my kid’s eye, that’s when. You want to see someone claiming authority and judgment? See a mama protecting her baby.

Protecting. We are all weak, but we are called to protect each other, protect the body of Christ. And there’s nothing more important to protect than the most vulnerable among us. There are places and moments where we have to take a moral stand, especially when it comes to people in a position of leadership whose choices are harming another.

Judgment is a tricky business, but it is necessary because people deserve protection.

Disciplining your kid is tricky business too, isn’t it? There is a line for behavior that is tolerable. There is a line for behavior that is intolerable. But where is it? And how come no one can seem to agree on it?

I have friends who spank. I have friends who time-out. I have friends who despise time-outs and only believe in time-ins. I have friends whose hairs stand on their necks to even consider that I might have friends who spank. And I have friends who roll their eyes at all of it. We’re all trying to raise kids to live well in this world. How do we make those judgment calls? How do we choose well, respond well, love well, protect well?

I’m starting to believe that it begins in a simple place, whether we’re talking about “discipline in the church” (doesn’t that phrase just make your insides cringe?), discipline for people in positions of authority, or discipline in the home. How do we draw lines, hold out consequences, love well?

I’m convinced that St. Benedict’s words are of utmost value to us right now in this generation of the Church, in this culture of Mommy-wars.

We must be “chaste, sober and compassionate.”

We must “let mercy triumph over judgment.” (That, by the way, is much more complicated than taking the easy way out and not confronting the problem. Think Jesus and the woman caught in adultery—John 7-8.)

We must always “bear [our] own frailty.”

I’m thinking that maybe before I spit out discipline for my kids, I’d better examine my heart. Maybe parenting a stubborn child who deliberately drops his pasta on the floor with a look of rebellion in his eyes should remind me my own rebellion toward God. Parenting should always be changing my view of God and my understanding of mercy. When I’m willing to see it, my children’s sin inevitably points back to my own.

And when I consider such an idea on the grand scale of the Church, I sigh. How beautiful would it be for pastors to be the most vulnerable of all of us? How powerful if every time a pastor was confronted with the sin in her congregation, she were forced to examine her own heart, to find her own faithless wanderings there, to find her own deep need for mercy?

The power of repentance is that God did not create it to be an individual task. He created us to need each other, to draw repentance out of each other, and to walk humbly with each other, always recognizing our own deep needs.

So, let us parent and minister and serve with chaste, sober, compassionate judgment. And let us always see, at the forefront of our lives, our own frailty. Then we can dream to be the Church that loves in the fullest expression, the Church that “always protects, always trusts, always hopes … never fails” (1 Corinthians 13).

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