Month: February 2022

Rank

Dear Benedict,

I’m looking out on another wet windy day in the valley. Although Storm Eunice has now blown through the trees are still tossing about and everything seems restless, finding it hard to resettle to their place in the world.

A fallen tree in Derbyshire

Some words change their meaning or emphasis and the idea of rank from chapter 63 of your Rule is like this. To you it just meant who had arrived first, who had been in the community the longest. The rank was just the number assigned from the first to the last. Its meaning has changed to be one of superiority or greater authority. A person has greater rank when they are given authority over others, regardless of when they arrived on the scene. It does seem to be a pervasive aspect of organisations: who is boss counts. Although the other meaning, the one you used, is not without problems, and can be used by early arrivals to stall or stymie change or progress in a community.

Rank: the rings indicate the number of years in the life of a tree.

As far as the trees are concerned, storms can change rank. Some of the oldest, biggest, most precious trees can find themselves felled. Neither gone nor forgotten, they have started on their ‘nurse log’ phase by which they begin to rot back into the earth, providing nutrients and refuge for many species in the process. They make it look easy, just lying their rotting, but for human beings the change in circumstances which come with different phases in our lives can be difficult. The urge to ‘pull rank’ can be hard to overcome.

Pulling rank: my fungus is bigger than yours!

Communities change and evolve as new responsibilities are shared out. We discover new skills in others and take on new roles ourselves. At some point we may embrace the challenge of the nurse log, sheltering and nourishing others as we decline and decay. It’s a noble calling.

Cross-wise trees

From my remembered gospel: The first shall be last and the last shall be first.

May I rot creatively.

From a Friend of Scholastica and a Member of the Lay Community of St Benedict.

Responsible

Dear Benedict

Most chapters of your Rule include more than one line of thought or instruction, so it can be difficult, in today’s context to see which strand to pick up and follow through. To be children in a monastic community in the 6th century is not something that is replicated today. Our modern education system is very different, but essentially the idea of nurturing young people to take on adult responsibility is a common link. That only leaves us having to decide what adult responsibility might be and who has attained it….

Is spreading fake news a demonstration of adult responsibility, or telling lies in public office , or ramping up international tensions, or renegading on international agreements, or persecuting minorities, or ….(fill in other irresponsible acts perpetrated by adults in the world recently)?

In the chair: an adult responsibility?

I think our world of adult and child is not a clear cut as you might have thought it in your day, when children stood up for their elders and didn’t sit down again unless given permission (Chapter 63). I don’t mean children today are impolite, far from it. I just think we don’t measure childhood by such things, and adults can be quite impolite anyway.

Play is a key aspect of childhood, but you don’t really mention it, for children or adults in your Rule, which is a shame as I enjoy it a lot. Indeed it is said to be important to our well being. Perhaps you thought some of the aspects of life in the monastery were playful or could be executed in a playful way, like liturgy or gardening. In too many places children never get to play and adults make life grim either directly or indirectly.

Remnants of childhood at Auschwitz

in 2015 I went with some young people to see some of the grimmer side of life with a visit to the former Nazi concentration camp of Auschwitz-Birkenhau. A place were thousands perished and certainly not a place for play, the faces of lives cut all too short and their pitiful belongs have stayed long in my memory, as they rightly should. Our corporate annual remembrance of the horrors of the Holocaust is now something we see through the eyes of those few remaining who were then children and now adults in their 90s.

Lessons from Auschwitz, 2015.

Which leaves open again the question of responsibility. Once the atrocities of the Holocaust were reveal many adults tried to evade responsibility for the events. Many children carried the weight of those events for the rest of their lives. It’s a very big example of the disconnect between adult and child responsibility but one which can find echoes in other ways in every community in which children take responsibility time and again as carers, for people of all ages, or bread winners and workers or peacemakers, often with little adult support.

Sun setting at Auschwitz-Birkenhau

It makes responsibility an everyone thing, especially responsibility for justice.

From my remembered gospel: Let the children come to me.

Shape me to fit my responsibilities, in ways both playful and serious.

From a Friend of Scholastic and a Member of the Lay Community of St Benedict.