Dear Benedict
I’m back from wandering for a bit so perhaps I’ll manage to get back to blogging about your Rule again. How frustrating it must have been to have monastics in the community who seemed to loose the point so often. There’s more than one way of wandering in community.
I’ve never managed to write about chapter 2 of your Rule, which is about the leadership of a community. Partly because I didn’t feel equipped to do so and partly because, whatever the community, it’s a tough subject these days. So I’ll try to give it a go now, although I am an imposter myself.
I haven’t been for an eye test for a while. I remember when I got one in my teens and spectacles were first prescribed. I said to my mother from our kitchen ‘So that’s what the end of our garden looks like’. Even with spectacles, I have for a long time, been aware of the planks and I’ve got good at squinting round them as we all do. They are a constant.
So how will anyone lead with a massive great beam projecting from their eye? You must have found this to be a hindrance too. Your Rule is said to have been a departure from the usual power play of the post-Roman world, reminding the community as it does of the leadership of Christ. Of course that’s not easy to adopt either. Western Christianity is full of examples of leadership that claim to be Christian but what sort of Christ do they reflect?
For example, recent attempts to amplify the voices of survivors of Church Abuse are to be commended, but quite frankly why is this taking so long?
Chapter 2 is a long chapter. It wanders about, and includes all sorts of stuff like physical punishment ‘for those that err’ and I don’t think you meant hesitate. Such action would be unthinkable in our own context. Yet stories still emerge of those who have endured physical assaults by bad leaders. In such cases it is the bad leaders who need rooting out.
It seems to me it’s easy for bad leaders to fool people. This accounts for some of the imposter syndrome in any humble would-be leader. We look at others and too often our own sense of inadequacy comes flooding back. To tell us to ‘lead like Christ’ is small encouragement in a setting that has Christ emblazoned in glory on the ceiling everyday and only on the floor with a bowl and towel once a year.
The community that yearns for Christ like leadership needs to keep up the search for Christ in the everyday. Christ in the kitchen, Christ in the cleaning, Christ in the listening, Christ in the welcoming. If a would-be leader cannot translate this into Christ in the meeting, Christ in the negotiating, Christ in the board room, Christ at the dispatch box then that’s not Benedictine leadership.
The real response to the call to Benedictine leadership is to be good enough. There’s probably no such thing as the perfect leader. But there is real leadership in owning a sense of inadequacy, a real discussion of feelings and reactions and in celebrating the success stories of the community. There’s always a need to keep on travelling.
From my remembered bible: The first shall be last and the last shall be first.
Grant us all a holy life.
A Friend of Scholastica, writing in Longdendale, 24th July 2023.