The Cloister Walk - Kathleen Norris [9]
My monastic friends are often at pains to counteract the romantic image of the monk or nun, insisting, rightly, that they are ordinary people. Every once in a while, however, the difference asserts itself, a reminder of the fact that the monastic world is not like the world that most of us inhabit. To eat in a monastery refectory is an exercise in humility; daily, one is reminded to put communal necessity before individual preference. While consumer culture speaks only to preferences, treating even whims as needs to be granted (and the sooner the better), monastics sense that this pandering to delusions of self-importance weakens the true self, and diminishes our ability to distinguish desires from needs. It’s a price they’re not willing to pay.
But in a consumer culture, monastic people must be vigilant, remaining intentional about areas of life that most of us treat casually, with little awareness of what we’re doing. One year at the American Benedictine Academy convention, an abbot, speaking on the subject of “The Monastic Archetype,” suddenly dropped all pretense to objectivity and said he was troubled by the growing number of cereals made available for breakfast in his community. “How many kinds of cereals do we need,” he asked, “in order to meet genuine health needs without falling into thoughtless consumerism?” The audience of several hundred Benedictine men and women broke into applause, obviously grateful that he’d captured, in one seemingly trivial example, an unease that many of them share about the way they live in contemporary America. One monk, a former abbot, said that he wasn’t as concerned with the number of cereals available as he was with the cafeteria-style of eating adopted by his community. “When we serve ourselves,” he said, “we do not exemplify monastic values.” He wondered if eating family-style, sharing from a common bowl, waiting to be served and then to serve one’s neighbor, was a practice monastic people could afford to lose.
A friend who is a retired corporate executive, and a Benedictine oblate, has pointed out to me that monastic, family-style management differs greatly from management as practiced by a corporation. While this difference sometimes results in Benedictines raising inefficiency to an art form, I’ve come to value the monastic witness to a model of institutional behavior that is not “all business,” that does not bow down before the idols of efficiency and the profit motive. Now that corporations are constructing ready-made “communities,” in the form of gated and guarded suburban enclaves, the difference between monastic community and corporate culture has become all the more evident.
What The New York Times recently termed “the fastest growing residential communities in the nation” are private developments created out of fear of crime and urban chaos. Fear is not easily contained, and it is not surprising to find that these developments also manifest a fear of individual differences that might spring up within the enclave itself, requiring a draconian set of rules that attempt to provide for every eventuality. Outdoor clotheslines, satellite dishes, and streetside parking are often prohibited, and in some communities, a pet dog who strays from its own yard is zapped by an electronic monitor. While strict regulation of such things as the colors of house paint, the height of hedges, the type of gardens or flower beds, and the number and size of hanging planters for the front porch may give the severely anal-retentive a place to call home, I find it a sad commentary on our ability to accept the responsibility of freedom. I suspect that it is also an experiment doomed to failure, as people discover that it is