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)

Stability: Eating your own dogfood

Build a house from the foundation up, not the roof down, right? The second great Benedictine Value is stability. “If everything is falling apart, what sort of people do you have to be?” asks II Peter. Life has always had its share of people who are just out for new experiences, driven by ego and vanity, running the demo but never the whole application.
To be discipled we need to commit to a life of stability in community.

This has various implications. Because I value stability, I will not throw my toys out of the pram when people disappoint me. I will not easily believe the worst of them. I will always recognise that I have more in common with them, in Christ, than separates us. Creatively, I will recognise that what irritates me most about them are my own vices mirrored — therefore by interacting with them rather than walking apart, I can learn and grow in grace.

Seeing the other person as gift, striving to see God within them, does not make people less irritating. It does help me grow up. A stable community rests on deeper foundations than its members short-term satisfaction, or the fears of its weakest members. It can take them beyond the places they could take themselves, but it is never authentic when it is steamrollers their differences. Stable community rejoices in difference and treats it as enrichment.

All this stands in stark contrast to the way of the world with its “Mr Angry” judgmentalism, Celebrity culture, ego-flattering consumerism, superficiality and tribalism. Just say no, because Christianity driven by these passions will always be a harsh and sour charicature of what it could be, with a commitment to stability. There are times you can be so right, you’re wrong.

God loved us with an everlasting love. That is the bedrock on which we build. Therefore we can freely commit to each other, and stick with each other, almost whatever our differences. The first principle of Magdalene is “Come Together” — Come as you are, but stick with one another. In the face of community friction, work it through and journey on anyway in hope. Wthin the community lie the God-given resources people need to grow in grace and hope — and if only they will commit to this life as a shared reality, there is hope.

This is the second of three posts about the core Benedictine virtues of Conversion, Stability and Obedience, reflected in the Magdalene Community of Nashville, TN.

Thomas Merton 60 years on

On this day forty years ago, Thomas Merton, 53, stepped out of the shower in a hotel bedroom and accidentally touched a short-circuited electric fan — a random end to an extraordinary life. Also on this day, but sixty-seven years ago, Thomas Merton, 26, stepped out off the streets into the guesthouse of a monastery, seeking acceptance into the Cistercian order. His was a life of great stability and order, amidst great randomness.

December 10 is a key date, then. Merton lived a sensitive, wild, intellectual, passionate, reflective, pragmatic, holy, privileged, disordered, centred life. What makes him a man for all seasons is that you can select every second word from that list and construct a simple personality — the redeemed or the rake. To understand Merton, though, you have to stick the list back together again and give every word its due weight. Merton did not collapse the ordered into the sensory aspect of his life, but lived elements of both to the full simultaneously. Merton’s holiness is emergent, not statuesque. And that is where his power and engagement come from.

Merton is a gloriously broad both/and character. His imagination and honesty shine clearly through his stumbling attempts to find God, and be centred in him. I doubt the present management in the Roman Church would be interested in making him a saint, because he hits all the wrong institutional tickle buttons. But it is impossible to think of Merton as one long dead, because very few of us have yet caught up with him; and it is that capacity to gift oneself to the whole Church, the whole world, that constitutes sainthood.

Saints, in this technical sense, hold out to others, freely, sometimes unwittingly, some tangible actualization of holiness. Anglicans don't do the Borders Reward Card thing about sainthood — we just let it emerge and then celebrate it. Therefore I cannot pontificate about exactly where Thomas Merton is, but if you go looking for him in heaven, I bet you’ll find him in the jazz section.

Merton rode white waters of chaos, and the heightened sensitivity that comes with living on adrenaline and late nights never entirely deserted him. He found stillness, supremely in a toolshed just beyond the monastery enclosure. His sacred centre was a dancing point, and that is the great resource he offers us, as we try and drink enough water to stay alive under the incessant shower — the information and media shower, the globalization shower, the goods, services and marketing shower. Showers are dangerous places...

And Merton’s message to us? The thing he learnt that we haven’t caught up with yet? Try this:

Man begins in zoology.
He is the saddest animal.
He drives a big red car called anxiety.
He dreams at night
of riding all the elevators.
Lost in the halls
he never finds the right door.

Man is the saddest animal.
A flake-eater in the morning,
a milk-drinker.
He fills his skin with coffee
and loses patience with the rest of his species.

He draws his sin on the wall,
on all the ads in all the subways.
He draws moustaches on all the women
because he cannot find his joy,
except in zoology.
Whenever he goes to the phone to call Joy,
he gets the wrong number.

Therefore he likes weapons.
He knows all guns by their right name.
He drives a big black Cadillac called death.

Now he is putting anxiety into space.
He flies his worries all around Venus,
but it does him no good.
In space where for a long time there is only emptiness,
he drives a big white globe called death.

Now dear children
who have learned the first lesson about man,
answer your test.

Man is the saddest aimal.
He begins in zoology,
and gets lost
in his own bad news.

Retreat notes 1: Community, stability

For much of last week, everything seemed to be on fire, with extraordinary light effects in the trees and all around the valley. Sometimes it all looked very much more dead, branches showing through, and no sunshine or blue sky to show off the autumn colours.

We have been talking in our diocese about “sustaining the sacred centre.” One wag at a recent diocesan synod suggested playfully that the sacred centre was Diocesan Church House! If I had to locate mine somewhere, it would probably be in the monastery. Not the place in itself, of course, but all it represents, with its vision of discipleship as an integrated way of life, founded on word and sacrament.
So what is real community? What principle to live by lies beyond private judgment? The old Tractarians pointed out that faith founded on private judgment can have no authority greater than that of the group members who exercise it. Faith which is simply private judgment writ large makes “Choice” itself a greater good than what is chosen can ever be. In healthcare, education, now even in finance, plenty of evidence is emerging that the great 20th Century God “Choice” is failing.

A monastery amounts to more than the sum of the individuals who comprise it, because it offers a means of living beyond private judgment; thus monks promise obedience. It is the front end of a far greater community stretching back in time, and its faith is offered with a reckless generosity to the whole world as part of a greater community of monastics, walking in the way of Christ under the guidance of Saint Benedict, committed to Conversion, Stability and Obedience.
The special element that lifts this kind of community way beyond a merely subjective existence and gives it authority, is Stability. Brought up in a consumer society, accustomed to pick our own friends and churches according to taste, life in a monastic community poses us a truly radical question: what would you do if you couldn’t simply change the other people for more congenial alternatives, or even change the other people into being the kind of other people you wanted? Or what if you could, and it turned out that the kind of people you wanted them to be and they became was not what you actually wanted or needed, or what they needed to be to fulfill their God-given potential?

Well then you would have to accept them, notionally, as they are, so that in fellowship with you they may become, and you might become, increasingly, what God would have you be, together. Commit yourself to them anyway, and see what happens; daring to believe that the faith you are called to exercise is more than private judgment, but is in some sense God’s gift to you and in you.
The foundation of such a Christian community, where such transformation can happen, is, ironically, stability. It can only work where its members are prepared to commit on a foundational level to stability of life. This is the argument against church hopping, even if you are (in any particular instance) right and they are wrong. But next time round they may be right and you may be wrong; and if you rejected them last time, where are they now? The only thing for it is to proceed together, turning the Church from a convenience into a school of Christ, founded on stability.

Therefore when disputes arise in Church, one primary question, alongside the rights and wrongs of the actual bone of contention, is about the quality of commitment of the people concerned to the community itself as their primary calling. As our life unfolds, you have to listen to those who are most committed to the stability of the whole community, as well as the most innovative, those who make most noise or are most skilled in politics. And when the further we adventure in faith, like a bungee jumper, the more important it is to be securely attached.
The more anchored we are in stability, the more adventurously and creatively we can, in fact, live.