Monks: still living by the rule.

Our real journey in life is interior, it is a matter of growth, deepening, and an ever greater surrender to the creative action of love and grace in our hearts.

--The Asian Journal of Thomas Merton 

At the Monastery of Christ in the Desert near Abiquiu, New Mexico, Prior Philip Lawrence, O.S.B. drives an hour and a half to a phone where he can return messages left at a radio receiver. His monastery is one of the most isolated in the world, deep in a canyon at the end of a 13-mile, unpaved trail. Weather is extreme, with temperatures ranging from 35 degrees below zero in winter to 106 above in summer.

Here, 25 monks maintain a 50-acre farm and computerize library catalogs--using computers powered by solar panels--to support themselves. Life is primitive, Lawrence says. Hailstorms can make the road impassable; even on a good day a traveler won't find a signpost on the road to this place. Nevertheless, an average of 15 to 20 guests make their way daily to the monastery.

In Erie, Pennsylvania, Sister Joan Chittister, O.S.B., author of Rule of Benedict: Insights for the Ages (Crossroads, 1992) and Wisdom Distilled from the Daily (Harper, 1991), lives and works with three other Benedictine sisters at an inner-city priory. "I'm looking at a crack house across the street," she says. "Next door is a tenement occupied by people living in a transient mess. Downstairs is an inner-city day-care center and a soup kitchen where we feed 450 people a day. We've brought ten single mothers off the street corner, and we're teaching them skills that will help them break the cycle of poverty."

At St. Vincent Archabbey in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, the site of the first Benedictine settlement in the United States and still one of the largest Benedictine communities of men in the world, monks sponsor a 1,200-student, liberal-arts college that U.S. News and World Report ranks among the nation's finest. The monastery's Archabbot Douglas Nowicki, O.S.B., with a background in child psychology, serves as a consultant to children's programming guru Fred Rogers, creator of nationally broadcast "Mister Rogers' Neighborhood."

A few miles from St. Vincent's, a community of 24 Benedictine women maintain St. Emma's retreat center, where more than 120 groups a year come to take in the silence and solitude. Beyond St. Emma's chapels, dining halls, and carefully tended lawns and gardens, pastures rise into the foothills of the Allegheny Mountains. But exit the front door, cross the street, and you're in a suburban development whose blocks and cul-de-sacs stretch far into the valley.

These are not the image of monks that I grew up with--holy women and men on a higher plane, far from the maddening crowd. The reality is richer and more complex. An ordained monk can serve as an archbishop (Rembert Weakland in Milwaukee, Wisconsin). Others have led a movement that fosters contemplative spirituality among lay-people (Cistercian monk Father Thomas Keating of Contemplative Outreach fame) and established a center to promote East-West dialogue (Pascaline Coff, a Benedictine Sister of Perpetual Adoration at Osage Monastery in Sand Springs, Oklahoma).

"Benedictine monasticism is a garden of diverse styles," Chittister says. The essence of monasticism has little to do with what monks do or how they look, but with the search for God that monks choose to undertake and a spiritually infused way of living with others. In The Asian Journal of Thomas Merton (New Directions, 1973), Trappist monk Father Thomas Merton wrote of a vitally necessary quality of life that "in the traditional religions was experienced in terms of God-consciousness . . . a sense of presence, of an ultimate ground of reality and meaning.

"The Christian monastic view of reality . . . is the view that if you once penetrate by detachment and purity of heart to the inner secret of the ground of your ordinary experience, you attain to a liberty that nobody can touch. . . . It represents an instinct of the human heart."

The human search for this presence and liberty is an ancient one, dating back to Egypt and Syria, and carried out in Buddhist, Hindu, and Jewish traditions. Fleeing the chaos of their times, the earliest monks encamped in the desert or walled themselves in mountain retreats. But even then, monks realized that it was the rare individual who could or should seek purification and union with the transcendent in solitude. They chose instead to live together in communities whose members would respect and be accountable to one another.

Today, all Roman Catholic monks in the U.S. follow the Rule of Saint Benedict or some form of it--as opposed to apostolic orders, such as the Franciscans, who follow the Rule of Saint Francis, or the Dominicans under the Augustinian rule. The apostolic orders have specific ministries in the church, such as evangelism or serving the poor. Monks, on the other hand, dedicate themselves primarily to the praise and worship of God. Besides the Benedictine order, there are others, such as the Trappists, Cistercians, and Carthusians, who follow the same rule but generally have a more austere, cloistered lifestyle.

In the sixth century, Benedict's rule for prayer and community living laid the groundwork for a monastic life that injected an element of stability in an otherwise dark age. Following the dictum to remain loyal to one community, work to support themselves, and offer hospitality to the stranger, monasteries were cores of stability. "Monks established the first Holiday Inns," Chittister says, "hospices that protected travelers from marauding bands." Monasteries became repositories of scholarship, practical skills, and accumulated wisdom in trades, agriculture, and crafts around which Western culture restored itself.

For centuries religious orders in general have been patterned after monastic traditions of community living and prayer, even those founded primarily to respond to the church's need to evangelize, immigrants' needs for education and health care, or women's needs for protection and education.

A perception endured, however, that monks--women and men--were the religious whose real job was to contemplate the meaning of life, pray, and engage in the search for God in a special way--generally within a cloister--that the rest of humanity didn't have time for. Monks were detached from and transcended the messiness of the secular world. And, somehow, we all got points for their goodness. With their prayer and contemplation, monks redeemed us. In return, we gave them a towering pedestal on which to stand.

Then, in the 1960s, God was declared more or less dead. Religious life, for a number of reasons much analyzed since, saw a mass exodus. The Second Vatican Council directed an excursion beyond the fortress mentality that developed during the Reformation, and those still wearing religious habits began evaluating from a new perspective just what it was they were all about.

A change in the order

Thirty years later, things are not what they were. Vast health-care and educational institutions formerly held firmly in the grasp of religious orders today may have little more than a token religious presence on their boards; retirement funds for religious in the U.S. show a $6 billion shortfall. The total number of religious women and men, of which monks are an unspecified percentage, declined by 45 percent in 30 years.

"The time for relying on structures has disappeared," Merton wrote in The Asian journal. "What is essential in the monastic life is not embedded in buildings, is not embedded in clothing, is not necessarily embedded even in a rule . . . It is concerned with this business of total inner transformation."

In The Monastic Journey (Doubleday, 1978), Merton said much about the core emphasis that the monk must place on the search for God, as well as interior growth and its relationship to maturity and freedom. The freedom of which he writes is from preoccupation and fear, from resentments and hostilities, from pride and contempt. His maturity is a capacity to accept normal problems realistically, to sacrifice, and to give generously of faith and compassion.

And while much of Merton's writing was directed specifically to fellow monks, it also introduced a generation of Christians to a contemplative dimension of spirituality to which, for its first 1,000 years, the church guided cleric and lay alike.

The monastic way nudges one toward a new perspective about oneself (Who am 1, really?), one's place among others (What does it mean to make a commitment to one community of people?), and one's relationship with God (What does it mean to see, know, and love God?).

Genuine self-knowledge is crucial, not the "I'm OK, you're OK" approach promoted in self-help manuals.

"We do not simply create our own lives on our own terms," Merton wrote. "Any attempt to do so is ultimately an affirmation of our individual self as ultimate and supreme self-idolatry."

Father Demetrius Dumme, author of Flowers in the Desert: A Spirituality of the Bible (Paulist Press, 1987), asserts that "self knowledge is the bedrock of any kind of spirituality. It means you accept what is true, not some fanciful thing you want to believe."

Community life facilitates genuine self-knowledge, Dumme's brother monk Archabbot Nowicki says with a smile. "Close living confronts illusion." Archbishop Weakland once said, "Living with people at close range over many years . . . is much more difficult than wearing a hair shirt."

The monk, living and working in the monastery, prays with the same people three to six times a day and eats with the same people three times a day. "It's very hard to become complacent or withdraw into myself," says Father Columba Stewart, O.S.B., professor of theology at St. John's University in Collegeville, Minnesota. "You are constantly pulled out of yourself and must overcome the desire to have the world revolve around yourself."

Who perseveres easily through the humiliations and revelations that inevitably occur when human beings share common spaces, be they bathrooms or chapels? Everyone's virtues and vulnerabilities become evident when one negotiates with other adults the timing of and responsibility for domestic chores, transportation and work schedules, community celebrations, and why the person who shopped for groceries bought the generic brand rather than the one requested.

"When things spin us into chaos, Christ keeps us together, not natural attraction," says Mother Mary Ann Noll, O.S.B. of St. Emma's. Community living "stretches us to have more patience and understanding than we were ever interested in giving."

Hasn't Western society improved on things by holding out hope for economic self-sufficiency and solitary living apart from the demands of others? From the monastic perspective, human beings can't escape the human condition.

"The world is with me even if I am alone," Stewart says. We can romanticize a place, be it a monastery or a luxury condo, but what we carry within ourselves doesn't permit us to wallow in the beauty for long.

Noll says that working and living with others is a saving grace that draws us beyond ourselves. "I imagine hell as a nursing-home room where there is no one to care for, nothing but me and my pain and wants and needs and hurts."

Of course, living with others long enough to gain self-knowledge among them requires commitment to one group of people, something that has been a priority for monks since the sixth century. Benedict understood that there was something spiritual about hanging in there.

"I suspect that when modern Americans ask `what is sacred?' they are really asking `what place is mine, what community do I belong to?'" writes Kathleen Norris, who returned to Western South Dakota from Manhattan and wrote of her homecoming and of inspiration derived at the nearby Benedictine monastery in her book Dakota, A Spiritual Geography (Ticknor and Fields, 1993).

Is authentic monastic community, then, a place where people learn patience and compassion toward one another? Is it a place where they see, perhaps only after years and years of rubbing elbows, Christ revealed in each other's strengths and weaknesses, and a place where strangers are welcomed?

Patience and compassion are much easier to contemplate than to practice. Norris writes that a Russian Orthodox monk put it this way: "I have finally learned to accept people as they are. Whatever they are in the world--a prostitute, a prime minister--it is all the same to me. But sometimes I see a stranger coming up the road and I say, `Oh, Jesus Christ, is it you again?'"

Relearning the rules

While Merton and others have reintroduced to lay Christians the contemplative spirituality that for centuries has been peculiar to monasticism, monks since the time of Benedict have reinterpreted the meaning of monastic life.

The Carthusian, Cistercian, and Trappist orders, to name the most prominent, are known commonly as reform movements that returned Benedictine monasticism to itself. It would be more accurate, Chittister says, to describe them as differing only according to the way each interprets Benedict's Rule. "The spirit and the values of the original rule pervade all Benedictine monasticism."

In each monastic community, interpretations of how to live the rule may vary. At St. Benedict's Convent, a women's community in Collegeville, Minnesota, the environment is "a whole lot freer" since the Second Vatican Council, says Sister Katherine Howard, O.S.B. "There's much more sense of personal and mutual responsibility. You don't do things just because that is the way it's been done before. There's more leeway for responding in love."

At St. Emma's, where women continue to dress in traditional black Benedictine habits, Mother Mary Ann Noll answers a question with a question. "What is the motivation for a rule? You tell a child n to touch the stove; then a few years later you tell them they better touch the stove and learn how to cook. What are we trying to achieve with rules? If I'm driving down a highway, it's very comforting to know that the cars coming at me will be on the left-hand side."

Noll views rules as vehicles for smoothing the way when people live closely together, not unlike the way exercise and training prepare the athlete for contemplation. With a smile, she asks, "Why do we find rules so chafing?"

Chittister's community adapted its interpretation of the rule after the Second Vatican Council, as did many communities where religious habits were modified or discarded and attention was refocused on thoughtful and responsible spirituality of which prayer and work are essential elements. "We were cloistered," Chittister says of pre-Vatican II days. "Nobody prayed with us; nobody was allowed in. At my first Christmas Eve in the convent, there was no one there but us." Like many monastic communities that now play an active part in local community life, Chittister's group found that when they opened the door, people came in. "Now so many come to join us that a sister is lucky to get into her own convent on Christmas Eve," she says.

Didn't cloistered communities make it possible to be genuinely contemplative in the manner that is most faithful to the monastic tradition? "Cloister can be a vehicle for contemplation, but the fuel, the center for contemplation comes from prayer," Chittister says. "Anyone can be a contemplative." To define cloistered as synonymous with contemplative is "to diminish the life of every working Christian."

Cloisters remain the vehicle of choice for communities such as Mepkin Abbey, a Trappist monastery in South Carolina,where men begin the day with vigils at 3 a.m. and meet again at specified periods throughout the day for common prayer, Eucharist, and meditation.

Prayer and spiritual reading remain central even in the routine of the College of St. Benedict or St. Vincent's in Latrobe, where monks are busily engaged in lecturing, research, counseling, and writing. Women and men meet in prayer at least three times each day and welcome lay co-workers and passers-by who join them in the chapel.

Monasticism was in fact lay driven to begin with, Keating says. "The inspiration for monastic life was always lay. It became clericalized. Benedict wasn't a priest." In the words of Abbot Francis Kline at Mepkin Abbey, who gave up a lucrative recording and concert career to escape the "false show," monasticism is "to give humanity back to itself."

If Keating's experience at Contemplative Outreach in Butler, New Jersey is any indication, humanity wants itself back.

Ten years ago, Keating founded Contemplative Outreach to promote interior patterns of prayer among Western Christians, which are essential not within cloisters but within human hearts--Keating struck chord. "We're only scratching the surface," he says. "The need is so vast."

Keating's work to return contemplation to its place in everyday Christian life builds on Merton's movement in the same direction. "Thousands were going to explore Eastern monastic traditions," unaware of the contemplative tradition in Christianity that had gone underground more than 400 years ago, Keating says.

Upon request Contemplative Outreach provides books, such as Keating's primer on centering prayer, Open Mind, Open Heart (Element Books, 1991), and videotapes on the spiritual journey. The mailing list has increased to more than 20,000 and includes seekers from throughout the U.S. and, more recently, from other English-speaking countries. Many attend the Intensive Centering Prayer retreats at St. Benedict's Monastery in Snowmass, Colorado, where Keating resides, as well as at other locations. Currently, there are local centering-prayer support groups in 37 regions.

A lay contemplative community in Warwick, New York called Chrysalis House, founded in conjunction with Contemplative Outreach, has been operating for eight years in what Keating calls "a new experiment in religious life." In this community, lay-people make temporary commitments; practice a simple, celibate life; and spend specified hours in prayer each day.

"The contemplative disposition," Keating says, "becomes contemplative service. It provides resources and energy to be self-sacrificing and to respond to human needs."

That's the part--response to human needs--that confronts stereotypes about monks, Chittister says. "I really believe we have to strip away romantic and plaster notions of monasticism . . . How can you look your God in the eye and not see the bodies of the homeless and the helpless? How do you search for God in a world that is coming apart at the seams and not find your way through social-justice action?"

The travel, work, lecture, and writing schedule of Keating or Chittister and the diverse ministries carried out by monks stand less as a contrast to real monasticism than as a testament to the tradition on which monasticism has endured for thousands of years. "We must be very spiritual," Chittister says. "Any trip that doesn't come out of my prayer routine is a wasted trip." Today, as in earlier ages, the stable presence of prayerful people must stand at the center of a society fractured by its modernity and mobility. "Monks provide a place for people to come," Chittister says. When you arrive at a Benedictine priory, you will always find prayer, and you will always find somebody at home who will take you in." She ticks off the list of ministries her housemates engage in daily in downtown Erie, but notes what holds it all together: "They'll all be home for dinner and prayer."

Not your average monastery

In Martin, Kentucky, Sister Eileen Schepers, O.S.B. and four other sisters established the Dwelling Place Monastery in 1992. "It doesn't look like what you think a monastery would look like," Schepers says of the two-story, frame house in the Appalachians.

Nor do these women who pray together three times a day look the part of monks. The women labored through overgrown grapevines and poison ivy, constructed a grotto, and transformed a storage room into a hermitage.

When Schepers talks about what it's been like to establish a new religious community in a rural area where Catholics, to say nothing of monks, are in short supply, she says, "People looked at us with suspicion and superstition. The idea that we were all women was difficult to understand, and people wondered who we were and why we were here by ourselves."

Reminiscent of the earliest monasteries, practical local conditions--an inadequate water supply--brought people together. Wells ran dry "after one load of laundry." Cisterns were only as good as the rainfall that fed them. So the monastery and 15 families are hoping to raise $70,000 to buy a pump and a holding tank. Schepers is hearing new questions: "Will you stay? Are you part of us?"

"This is home," Schepers says. She intends to stay. But given the pace of aging in the monastic community, will monks be around to provide a spiritually infused presence to future generations?

Christ in the Desert Abbey is "bursting at the seams," Lawrence says, attracting more vocations to monasticism than it has beds and showers for. In Erie, Chittister's community includes 11 novices. St. Vincent's vocation office in Latrobe receives 850 inquiries a year, and St. Emma's recently welcomed a 26-year-old novice.

Is this symbolic of an emerging spirituality or a response to a perceived failure of the Great Society? Lawrence recalls his own youthful dedication to peace and justice, the demonstrations he joined, and the many letters he wrote. "I was totally liberal," he recalls. Today, he says, "It is difficult for me to think of myself as conservative or traditional, since all my early years in the seminary and in monastic life were such a whirl of liberalism and radicalism.

"On the other hand, I believe that I have tried to follow what seems true, and that has taken me into lots of byways and many times off the track. Always, though, the Lord seems to pull me back into the wisdom tradition that is handed down in monastic life. Today I rejoice in simply being a monk, and I try to live it with all my heart for the Lord Jesus."

Keating sees a "tide coming in" that can deepen spirituality among laypeople. In today's world, he says, "it is difficult but all the more necessary the busier one becomes. On the merry-go-round one ceases to be in touch with one's deeper self, creativity, things that are conducive to human growth. It's practical to take a mental rest for one's own health. But the chief motive is relating with the deepest reality of life, which is God within us."

A Trappist monk in Frank Bianco's book Voices of Silence, Lives of the Trappists Today (Doubleday, 1992) says, "We don't have a vocation crisis. We've got a vocation bonanza on our hands. Just stop and think about the great thought that's coming out of women in the church. Listen to the sermons lay deacons are giving. Look at the nourishing liturgy the laity have designed for themselves in the so-called priestless parishes.

"People are taking back the franchise Christ intended them to have when he established his church. They're searching for ways to make their lives meaningful. They want to be happy . . . What's important is not how people get closer to God, only that they do."

All the same, Kathleen Norris makes clear in Dakota, A Spiritual Geography that she would miss the monastery were it not there. "I found that it is powerful without being seductive; it does not lead aside or astray, but home."

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"Getting enough to eat?" Dan asked, as we sat on the bakery steps, munching the fresh rolls. The question pricked my curiosity. Dom Stephen had asked me the same question two-days after my arrival. He also wanted to know if I was getting enough sleep. Aside from the first day, when my body clock had to adjust to an early bedtime, the schedule seemed manageable. Besides, there was something special about rising so early to pray. My mind seemed clearer, less open to distraction.

I thought any concern about my starving was even less justified. The food was plentiful and I had yet to have my dreams haunted by giant Big Macs. Why were they all so concerned? I asked. What was it about their diet and their schedule that they felt was so impossible to manage?

"You're right," Dan said. "You'll probably never feel the pressure. Everything's still a novelty. It takes time before you realize that it will never change. Basically, the commitment a monk makes binds him to a deadly boredom. Everything will repeat ad infinitum. The monk has to come to terms with the fact that nothing and no one may ever change.

"That's what's going to make your job harder. Right now, you're a novelty. All we see are your good points and that's all you see of us. It's a first-date situation and we're both on our best behavior. You don't really have to accept those parts of this life you don't like."

"That's not true," I protested. "I'm doing everything you monks are doing. I don't want any special treatment."

"But somewhere in the back of your mind, you know this will end. You won't have to get up at three in the morning some day when you're tired or you have a headache. You can hop in your car and go into Bardstown anytime you want. Our vow of stability binds us to this geography until they plant us in it."

"Some critics claim that vow insulates you from the problems the rest of us can't escape," I countered.

"Think so? What about our commitment to the people here--people we didn't choose, who we have to accept as though we did?" When most people in the world talk about finding God in their daily lives, they overlook their immediate circumstance, Dan said. "Charity comes easy with complete strangers. You never run up against their differences, those nice little sharp edges of their personality.

"Try accepting somebody you'd like to change," Dan suggested. "Try resolving that you won't even try. Try accepting the world and everything in it as it is. Try limiting yourself to contributing rather than controlling it."

The degree to which a monk is open to his world indicates the degree to which he has opened himself to God, Dan explained. Openness is a function of poverty and obedience. Openness is freedom. It is the alignment of the individual's will with that of God. It is the path to authentic identity.

"When a Trappist monk vows to be poor, he does not simply forgo ownership of things," Dan said. He promises to stop wanting. He resolves to wean himself from the pull and the call of possessions and of power.

Vowing to stay in one place with the same people for the rest of your life is a commitment to appreciate unending beauty in the simplest elements of existence. It makes the Lord's Prayer come alive, Dan said. "Not my will, but yours, on earth as it is in Heaven." A monk opens his life to God--on God's terms. He recognizes that every one of his brothers was brought to this place by God. Their presence in this place is sacramental.

"`I trust and depend on you,' the monk tells God. `I know you love me. You will be present to me in whatever a day brings, whomever I meet. You will be present when the ovens overheat. You will be present when my brother who can't stand me overheats. I know you will be there. I will look for you and if only because I do, you will be.'"

Excerpted from Voices of Silence, Lives of the Trappists Today (Doubleday, 1992) by Frank Bianco.