It’s not what you say...

Three times a year, many of us who take the Rule of Benedict as our guide come to the Prologue. This opens with an appeal to start with God, to open our eyes, hearts and ears, paying careful attention to what happens when we open our mouths. Benedict, always life-affirming, quotes Psalm 34:

Who is there who really desires life,
long life, to enjoy good?
Keep your tongue from evil,
and your lips from speaking deceit.
Depart from evil, and do good;
seek peace, and pursue it

This isn’t saying that bad words are especially naughty compared to bad anything else. Rather, the Rule takes our speech patterns as a window into our souls, laying bare our real attitudes and intentions. We are accountable for far more than the content.

The psalm values truthful rather than manipulative or deceitful speech, but not merely as a defensive, negative thing.

God looks on the heart.

Disciples are called to a grace that actively does good, seeks peace and pursues it. Merely to avoid harm is better than causing it, of course, but it feeds self-righteousness, and leads ultimately to a life of stagnation and mediocrity. The intention behind defensive living, like that behind righteous words, can be defective or even evil. If our purposes are anger, self-righteousness, spite or destruction, we are falling short of all we are called to be. Blessing comes from nothing less than nonviolence as an active pursuit.

So there’s a challenge at the beginning of new year. Driving a car is not just about avoiding accidents, but deciding where we want to go, and aiming for it singleheartedly. We need to be ashamed of those times in Church, of all places, we do not tell the truth, we walk in fear and reactionary anger, we allow our mouths to run away with us. And if we should find ourselves this year feeling we cannot speak up for justice, as positive peacemakers, in the face of the Church’s own institutional blindness, apathy, inertia or even conformism that can open the door to abuse, we need to seek gracious ways of opening ears, eyes, hearts and even, dare I say it, mouths.

A tall order! But to the extent we fulfil it, our local churches become real, credible, and authentic as Christian communities: Good News in the communities they serve.

Clergy numbers and deployment

I return from a period of monastic study and reflection, and meet with a group to discern a clergy apppointment. Meanwhile Doug Chaplin has been raising significant questions about local clergy deployment cuts under the challenging title “The Big question in an elderly and inward-looking Church”. This relects acute and timely ventilation of similar and significant issues by Ruth Gledhill and, especially, John Richardson. I don’t know details of the various anecdotes circling the ether, but it’s good these questions are being raised openly.

What I wonder about is the quality as well as quanitity of staff appointments and the criteria we put in parish profiles, and the way they relate to the rule.

Benedict’s criteria for job selection are clear. Relying on pragmatic knowledge of a person’s deeds revealing their character and intentions in community, people are given opportunities to prove themselves faithful, diligent and competent. They should work to the best of their ability, in an ordered way, within the fundamental balance of prayer, contemplation, work and rest, accepting radical mutual accountability to God through the community, incuding the disciplines of chapter and listening to the least voice. Discernment should be led by the abbot, shared with the community. High commitment to Conversion, stability and obedience, Gospel zeal, competence, openness to others score high. Ego, opinion, outside status and Politics score low.

Such appointments are difficult, if not impossible, if we...

• are not sufficently a community to know our people properly and what they bring to the party;
  
  
• pretend or waffle about our intentions for the job
  
  
• do not observe the highest standards of justice in our equality and diversity practices. There are indications in Jesus’ teaching we would aspire to even greater and more honest relationships with our people than, say, Marks & Spencer, but we have to treat our people at least as fairly as they would treat theirs.
  
  
• score results rather than motives, surrender awarenss of competence, balance and intentions for a vague concept like “performance.”
  
  
• allow dirty information or untested assumptions into the process, including politics in the mean sense and anecdotal based assumptions
  
  
• measure character mainly by checking for failings, rather than accounting it in positive descriptive terms as we weigh any offer to take on a job
  

Punishment, Stability and Community

In my ordinary daily sequence of reading, prayer and meditation, I’ve been reading the really uncongenial part of the Rule of Benedict, chapters that deal with punshment in the community. To put things in historical perspective, corporal punishment was universal in the sixth century, and Benedict’s use of it minimal compared to contemporaneous sources. The Rule is not designed to absolutise the disciplinary practices of its age any more than the Parable of the Good Samaritan is designed to make people beat up Samaritans.

However, it is interesting to note who gets punished in the rule. Unlike our age, Benedict does not punish incompetence, human failing, ignorance, lack of spiritual intensity, failure, or saying the wrong thing openly. The rule does punish subversive grumbling, and sabotage of the community life. He expects dissent within the community, indeed encourages it as an expression of repect, but takes its toxic forms very seriously. A stable community cannot grow without basic respect, humility and realism all round. Community is not a syrupy and largely meaningless synonym for “everybody”, but a testing ground for character and motives.

So farewell then, if we want to walk in the way of Benedict, to email firestorms, hypocritical finger wagging, control by threats and manipulation, angry cynicism, and ego driven community sabotage. These need to be exposed for what they are, not tarted up with Conservative, or for that matter Radical suspenders. The community needs to be honest about what is really going on. Nobody gets punished for making bad tea, but however passionately they feel they are right, if they start slipping arsenic into it, three strikes and they’re out (another interesting Benedictine principle)