June 7

The Seventh Sunday after Pentecost

The Rule of St. Benedict: Chapter 30

I will leave reflecting on this chapter to one who is far wiser than I.  If possible, I encourage you to read all of Sr. Joan Chittister's commentary on Chapter 30, which concludes,

The real lesson of the chapter is not that young people should be beaten. The continuing value of the chapter is that it reminds us quite graphically that no one approach is equally effective with everyone. No two people are exactly the same. In bringing people to spiritual adulthood we must use every tool we have: love, listening, counsel, confrontation, prayer that God may intervene where our own efforts are useless and, finally, if all else fails, amputation from the group.

The real point of this and all seven preceding chapters of the penal code of the Rule is that Benedictine punishment is always meant to heal, never to destroy; to cure, not to crush.

Br. Chad

July 6

The Rule of St. Benedict: Chapter 29

It isn't clear whether "a brother who through his own fault leaves the monastery" is a brother who has just been expelled by the Abbot a la Chapter 28, or whether St. Benedict is changing the subject to address all members who may leave, by their own will or not.  In any case, it is worth noting that our Father Benedict makes no stipulation that would disqualify those who have been expelled through the process laid out in Chapter 28 from re-entry here in Chapter 29.

After all the time and effort and pain that the community has spent to bring the defiant back to the path of their vows, and after the best efforts of the most skilled "physicians" have failed to heal, one would think that the Rule would say, "That's it.  We wash our hands of you."  But it doesn't.  It says that this process may happen, that the community must be willing to bear the painful burden of failed corrective measures and expulsion up to three times for an individual.

Think of an employee in an organization whose recalcitrant behavior forces her boss to take her through a carefully conceived, skillfully implemented, and very costly series of disciplinary measures intended to bring the employee back to good standing.  But her recalcitrance remains firmly fixed, and she is ultimately fired.  If that former employee were to come back a year later claiming to have learned her lesson, who would expect that organization to offer her a job?  And to do it three times?

This is a lavish mercy.  This is true sacrifice.

Br. Chad

July 5

The Rule of St. Benedict: Chapter 28

To begin, let us set aside the remarks about physical punishment; they are a stumbling block for our understanding. As Sr. Joan writes,

Beating people with the rod is considered neither good pedagogy nor good parenting now, and the notion of whipping full-grown adults is simply unthinkable.  Times have changed; theories of behavior modification have changed; the very concept of adulthood has changed; this living of the rule has changed."

But she continues,

What has not changed, however, is the idea that human development demands that we grow through and grow beyond childish un-control to maturity and that we be willing to correct things in ourselves in order to do it, whatever the cost.

This is the essence of St. Benedict's theory of correction for faults.  If one is to follow upon this path, the defiant self-will must be relinquished, and there is only so much anyone else can do to inspire and encourage its relinquishment.  When, after all the measures at the disposal of human community are undertaken to loosen one's obstinate grip, there comes a point when one must be released from the care of the community to make one's way with clenched fists through the world outside.  To do otherwise would force the community to distort around the defiant one, to accommodate the anomaly like organs accommodate a tumor.  Any leader who would knowingly allow such tumors to grow and harm the body does not follow in the footsteps of our Father Benedict.

Br. Chad

July 4

The Rule of St. Benedict: Chapter 27

After all the apparent harshness of the last four chapters, St. Benedict shows clearly in Chapter 27 that love motivates these corrective measures.  The superior is to teach the wayward by means of a threefold approach, "reprove, entreat, rebuke", in order to bring about correction for the good of all.  The practice of excommunication in the Rule, then, is the opposite of outright banishment where the superior is concerned; it is a process of full and diverse engagement.  We see in this chapter that, rather than removing the offender from the realm of concern, the offender is set in the place of highest concern where the most valuable resources of the community, its wise elders, are set in motion to heal and restore.

This is the deep compassion of our Father Benedict.  There is no vindictiveness or punitive motives at play, but love that is willing to bear the burdensome effects of an offender's recalcitrance.  In fact, the Rule reminds the superior that "what he has undertaken is the care of weak souls and not a tyranny over strong ones."  It is to be the disposition of Benedictine authority to care for the weak and struggling, not to cater to the compliant and righteous.

Br. Chad

July 3

The Rule of St. Benedict: Chapter 26

The act of relieving pain is alluring to many of us.  We see someone hurting and we want to provide some help, something that will take away the discomfort we perceive.  In and of itself, this impulse is laudable.  It has the potential to heal and comfort.  But, more often than we care to admit, the impulse to relieve pain derives from our own self-interest -- to relieve our own guilt, our own discomfort, to meet some need within ourselves to be needed, helpful, effective.

If our lives are to become a source of true health and healing in the world, there comes a time when we must learn to distinguish between our interests and the interests of others.  Until we learn to do so, we live  under the delusion that all of our impulses to help are pure and all our motives to relieve pain are true.  Under this delusion we have very little idea what effect our behavior actually has on the one in pain, nor do we really care, because we get what we need from the transaction -- the relief of guilt, comfort, the feeling of being needed, helpful, effective.

To act from within this delusion, our Father Benedict understands, is as insidious and destructive to community life as the faults that warrant excommunication.  When I cannot resist inserting myself into a healing process that is being directed by a wise physician, I jeopardize the effectiveness of the cure.  As Sr. Joan writes, "It is not supportive to take away a person's heart medicine simply because they do not like the taste of it.  It is not supportive to fail to set a broken leg simply because the setting will be painful."

Br. Chad

July 2

The Rule of St. Benedict: Chapter 25

Sr. Joan Chittister writes in her commentary on Chapter 25 that our betrayal of community can come to a point when

Benedict's rule calls for the group whose life we affect to say, "Enough," to quit bearing us up on the litter of community, to quit rewarding our selfish and surly behavior with security and affirmation and a patina of holiness.  Excommunication, for all practical purposes, says "You want to be a world unto yourself? Fine. be one."

Sometimes it takes drastic measures for us to recognize the extent to which our life depends upon community.  We take for granted the benefits that community affords, and it isn't until those benefits are removed that we are made to face the implications of our behavior.  Our Father Benedict instructs that the excommunicated work alone and prohibits the customary blessing exchanged between monks in passing as well as the common blessing of the food because these things bring into sharp relief the reality of life outside of community.  I hear an implied question: "Is life outside really what you desire?"

The profession rite for The Community of St. Mary of the Annunciation begins with the question, "What is it that you desire?" to which the candidate replies, "To dedicate my life to Holy God through the vows of Stability in this community of canons, Conversion through the monastic way of life, and Obedience according to the Rule of our Holy Father Benedict."  There is nothing in the rite about this way of living being the only true path to God.  But it is the path we have stood up and declared as our own, and we have taken vows that place our feet firmly upon it.  In the context of a vowed life, it is not with vengeance or a spirit of retribution that the rule makes provision for dealing with those who wander from the path.  It is to bring us back to the first question we answered when we approached our path in the first place.

Br. Chad

July 1

The Rule of St. Benedict: Chapter 24

As we saw yesterday, the faults we are dealing with here are betrayals of community life.  They involve drawing benefits from a community while behaving in such a way that threatens the community's health.  As such, St. Benedict fixes the consequences for these faults squarely at the heart of Benedictine community life, at the table and in prayer.

The connotations of the word "excommunication" in our current understanding are distracting, if we seek to understand the spirit of our Father Benedict's instructions.  This is not excommunication in the idiom of banishment to eternal damnation.  This is not a bishop cutting off a Roman Catholic nun from her church for political reasons.  This word is used here to indicate a far more literal dynamic, that of being "excluded from the common" aspects of life in the monastery.  And, depending on the seriousness of the fault as judged by the religious Superior, this excommunication is applied in degrees toward a two-fold end: the preservation of community health and the restoration of the wayward member.

This is the original "natural and logical consequence" method of parental discipline put in place by a father who loves us.

Br. Chad