ST. BENEDICT AND LIVING IN THE WORLD July 28, 1997 presentation, Part II Conference for Oblate Directors and Oblates Dennis Okholm, OblSB, Oblate of Blue Cloud Abbey  

        But how can we maintain this dual mentality toward the "world" today? How can we do it, not in a world of authors on tour, academics in lecture halls, or monastics in the cloister - how do we do it: · on the 9-to-5 job doing anonymous, unappreciated, and often devalued secretarial work in a large corporation?  ·

- in Lawndale - one of the poorest communities that is west of Chicago, where a man told me last month that he had been held up at the point of a .357 the day before?

- in Sudan - where one million people have died in the past ten years, where I have witnessed child skeletons running through one of the four displacement camps in which the government hides 3 million Sudanese Africans whose only crime is that they were not born Arab and Muslim, and where Christians, like my friend Idris, have explosives thrown into their homes because they are not Muslims, and who give contributions to widows whose husbands have been killed and whose children have been orphaned?

- in the factory line where a person's only realistic dream in life is to be able to work for the same company for 40 years without being injured in order to accrue enough of a pension to retire in mediocrity?

        Indeed, it has been about these contexts that I have often been asked this question after giving presentations about Benedictine spirituality: "This is not realistic for our lives. What about the real world?"   Of course, this begs the question. We must first determine what the real world is. Those who insist that the monastery is not the real world may have a naturalistic one-sided view of the world pervasive in our society and characteristic of the "world" (i.e., the prevailing ethos).

        I learned something about this point from one of my college students. As a high schooler, she had come back from a week of Christian camp to tell her father that it was time to come down from the mountain top and enter back into the "real world." Her wise father answered her, "Daughter, you were in the ‘real world’!" In other words, the mountain top experience of Christian community that she had experienced at camp was the world as God intended it when he created the cosmos. What we have made it (the "world" into which she re-entered) is "not the way it's supposed to be" (to borrow a phrase from the movie Grand Canyon.

        In fact, most of us who live in the marketplace live on the surface of life, like skipping stones that touch the surface once in a while without knowing the true depth of the water beneath. The real world - cosmos- in the first sense - is hidden in the context of the prevailing ethos - cosmos in the second sense.

        So, to those who say that the monastery is not the "real" world, one might respond by saying that it actually takes us far deeper into the real world than most other things we experience, certainly more than does the unreflective flipping of hamburgers at fast food restaurants 8 hours a day - an observation I made to a college student who visited a monastery and came back to report that he just did not see what use it was to spend all day in a cloister praying. I suggested that he compare it to many of the activities we engage in day after day, of which asking repeatedly the question, "Do you want fries with that?", might be one paradigmatic case. 

        In answering the question about living redemptively in the created cosmos in such a way that we do not adopt the prevailing ethos ("cosmos" in the second sense), we must begin with a fundamental insight of Benedictine spirituality: we are to embrace all life and peoples God has made and given to us. (It is for this reason that I have spent the last two decades trying to marry my head and my heart, and why we should not disparage either the academic or the poet. In the same way, we must not simply "write off" people whom we label "liberals" or "fundamentalists" - or "Protestants" and "Roman Catholics" and "Eastern Orthodox").

        The point is: Benedictine spirituality makes us aware of God's presence in every area of life and in every encounter. Neglecting this fundamental insight of Benedictinism will leave us impoverished in our experience of God, for we will have closed off one aspect of life in which the omnipresent God could be known to us - a point nicely made by Esther deWaal in Seeking God. A postcard I purchased in a Benedictine monastery's gift shop makes the point succinctly and quite well; I display it in my office as a reminder. The card shows a quote from Emily Dickinson: "Take care for God is here."

           The disciplines of monastic life refocus our attention on what is really going on around us... even when we are just flipping burgers. Monastic disciplines plunge us deeper into the reality of everyday life because we go deeper into God's reality. They plunge us beneath the surface of "busyness" to notice deeper dimensions of the person who is next to us, to experience the joy of our children's pleasure at play, or to hear the seemingly endless variety of birds’ songs.
 
        For example, the discipline of community, whether it be practiced in churches, marriages, families, or friendships, cultivates a rejection of the world's individualism.  If you want to know God, you'll only come to know Him in community. You grow in the coenobium, or not at all.

        The discipline of stability reminds us that the world's idea of fulfillment through constant change is counterproductive. In fact, stability destroys the illusion that the "grass is greener" if we would just change marriages, churches, or jobs. It's a much needed reminder in a world with a 50% divorce rate.

        The discipline of a regulated and balanced life with Psalter at center alters a worldly view of work. It teaches us the true purpose of work: that work should celebrate the dignity of humans who do it; that what matters more than what you do is for whom you do it; and that when work is kept in balance with prayer and everything else in life we can be kept from the temptations of pride, of overwork as a means of self-congratulation [e.g., "You think you've been working hard. Just wait until I tell you what I have to do!"], and of resistance to God's saving grace (since work can become an attempt to justify ourselves).

        The discipline of obedience is tied to self-emptying - not a popular concept in today's world. It testifies against the need to be in control in a world of control freaks where obedience is a dirty word.

        The discipline of listening in the silence teaches us volumes in a world where the marketplace is so noisy that one does not often hear the needs of humans in our midst or the still small voice that speaks within.

        The discipline of poverty, understood as trusteeship or stewardship, is a renunciation that forces me to take into account the needs of others in a world where greed and gain put smart investments ahead of concerns for God's earth and other people - a world in which avarice is no longer one of Gregory's deadly sins but one of Donald Trump's virtues.

       The discipline of chastity revises the way we think about our bodies in a world where bodies are merchandise or are blown up with special effects for entertainment.

        Finally, we come to the discipline of intercession. What this can do for God's cosmos over against the world's prevailing ethos is well-summarized by William Stringfellow in The Politics of Spirituality: Whatever other forms that witness of resistance may take, I believe it must incorporate aspects of venerable monastic tactics, which also have origins in biblical spirituality.

        The first of these is intercession - the work of intercession and, if you will, the politics of intercession - the solemn offering to Almighty God of all the cares and needs of this world whatsoever represented in the offertory of certain particular necessities and issues implicating persons and communities known to those who intercede. In the tradition of intercession, as I understand it, the one who intercedes for another is confessing that his or her trust in the vitality of the Word of God is so serious that he or she volunteers [to] risk sharing the burden of the one for whom intercession is offered even to the extremity of taking the place of the other person who is the subject of the prayer. Intercession takes its meaning from the politics of redemption. Intercession is a most audacious witness to the world (p. 84).  This is a monastic discipline I can use in the world of Lawndale or Sudan, as are the others I have mentioned.

            All of these and other monastic disciplines exist over against even a shallow North American church with a gospel that permits the materialist and racist to remain as such - a church that is once again in need of another monastic call for reform. [One of my evangelical Protestant brothers, an Argentine evangelist named Rene Padilla, has said of the North American church:  Far from being a factor for the transformation of society, [it] has become merely another reflection of society - another instrument that society uses to condition people to its materialistic values.  Instead, the call is for a church that self-consciously manifests Christ's Kingdom in history. The obedient church will bear the marks of Christ's mission]

(To be continued in the next issue)

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