The Cloister Walk - Kathleen Norris [10]
The Romans lost everything to barbarian invaders. Ironically, it is another legacy of the fall of Rome, the Benedictine monastery, that is still going strong fifteen hundred years later. As a young man, Benedict had abandoned the decaying city. “[Putting] aside his father’s residence and fortune,” his biographer Gregory the Great tells us, “and desiring to please God alone,” Benedict adopted the life of a hermit in the countryside. But his renown as a spiritual man soon attracted others, and in accommodating them, establishing a monastery and writing a rule for their way of life, Benedict was able to serve the world in ways that a “private community” cannot. He took it for granted that the world would come to monks. “A monastery is never without guests,” he said, implying that a true monastery is never so shut off from the world as to stop attracting guests.
The modern guest who partakes of Benedictine hospitality soon discovers that it entails a remarkable freedom to be oneself. If you start to sing Ramones songs in a loud voice at three in the morning, chances are someone will ask you to quiet down. But then, again, maybe not. The responsibility is yours; rules and regulations are kept to a minimum. In fact, the “customary” of a monastery—a book that contains, in written form, the everyday customs and traditions of the place—reveals that Benedictines themselves live free from much written legislation. The customary of one of the largest monasteries in the world is little more than a sketchy outline. One monk told me, “This is because the minute you write something down, you set it in stone. And that’s dangerous, because then someone will want to enforce it.” Because they operate as families, Benedictines can claim a culture that is primarily oral rather than written, more dependent on lived experience than explicit codes of conduct.
I once heard a monk who has doctorates in both canon and civil law explain that Benedict had taken one of the strengths of Roman society, a passion for civil order, and had converted it into legislation for a way of life that integrates prayer, work, and communality so flexibly that it is still relevant to twentieth-century needs. It may be more relevant now than ever. “While Benedict respected the individual,” he said, “he recognized that the purpose of individual growth is to share with others.” It was refreshing to hear a good legal mind with soul, another reminder of the monastic difference: “We live in vigil,” the monk said, “working at love in common living. Monastic life is meant to be lived in vigil, in koinonia, or, a community of love. And it looks toward eternal life, where love will be completed.” I don’t know many tough-minded lawyers who talk like this.
Benedictines often remind me of poets, who while they sometimes speak of the art of poetry in exalted terms also know that little things count, that in fact there are no things so “little” as to be without significance in the making of a poem. Monastic life also requires paying attention to the nitty-gritty. “We know that details matter,” another monk once told me, “and we’ll tinker with our liturgy of the hours, trying a minute of silence after each psalm, after discovering that ninety seconds is too long. But we are still an experiment, after all these years, and we resist codifying.” The great experiment of Christian monasticism has taken so many forms that it is hard to characterize: now, as in the fourth century, monastic people live as hermits, in loosely organized clusters of hermits, as members of cloistered communities, and in communities in constant contact with the world. They are urban, rural, and they live in wilderness; they work as pastors (and as counselors,