The Cloister Walk - Kathleen Norris [12]
Contemporary American Benedictines, like the culture they live in tension with, are struggling with questions of diversity. Communities founded by Swiss or German monastics a century or more ago are contending with the loss of old customs, as their newest members—of Mexican, Laotian, Vietnamese ethnicity—bring new customs with them. Several Benedictines who teach novitiate classes in both men’s and women’s communities, have said to me that one of the biggest problems monasteries currently face is people who come to them having no sense of what it means to live communally. Schooled in individualism, often having families so disjointed that even meals in common were a rarity, they find it extremely difficult to adjust to monastic life. “They want to be alone all the time,” one formation director said to me of his current novices. “I have to force them to do things as a group.”
Monasticism is a way of life, and monasteries are full of real people. In considering the great tensions that have always existed in the monastic imperative—between structure and freedom, diversity and unity, openness to the world and retreat from it—monks are better off when they retain the ability to laugh at themselves. One monk, when asked about diversity in his small community, said that there were people who can meditate all day and others who can’t sit still for five minutes; monks who are scholars and those who are semiliterate; chatterboxes and those who emulate Calvin Coolidge with regard to speech. “But,” he said, “our biggest problem is that each man here had a mother who fried potatoes in a different way.” Differences between individuals will either be absorbed when the community gathers to act as one, or these communal activities become battlegrounds. As one monk, a liturgist, once said to me, “Go to the dining room and to prayers, and you’ll find out how a monastery is doing.”
When I think of all that monasteries have survived in the 1500-plus years of their existence—pirate raids, bandits, wars and revolutions, political and social upheavals of all kinds, dictators, tyrants, confiscation, foreclosure, martyrdom at the hands of kings, as well as co-opting by the wealthy and powerful—I find it amazing that they’re still here. “We’re as persistent as weeds,” one Benedictine friend says. “We just keep springing up.” I suspect that it is the difference, the adherence to monastic bedrock, what one sister calls the “non-negotiables” in the face of changing circumstances, that makes monasticism so indestructible. Monastic communities traffic in intangibles—worship, solitude, humility, peace—that are not easily manipulated by corporate concerns, not easily identified, packaged, and sold. It will be interesting to see how monastic communities fare in a world which gives more and more power to large, multinational corporations.
I expect they’ll survive, with their difference, the absurdity of faith that attracts people to a communal way of life and gives them the strength to persevere in it. “The basis of community is not that we have all our personal needs met here, or that we find all our best friends in the monastery,” I once heard a monk say. In fact, he added, his pastoral experience with married couples had taught him that such unreasonably high expectations of any institution, be it a marriage or a monastery, was often what led to disillusionment, and dissolution of the bond. “What we have to struggle for, and to preserve, is a shared vision of the why,” he said, “why we live together. It’s a common meaning, reinforced in the scriptures, a shared vision of the coming reign of God.”
September 30
JEROME
We hear from Jerome today, at morning