Category: climate

Wrong!

Dear Benedict

In chapter 70 of your Rule you write about physical violence between monastics. Clearly not something to condone, you complete the chapter with the quotation: ‘Never do to another what you do not want done to yourself’.

I’m not sure what size your community was or how many monastics gathered together in a community following your Rule in general through the ages. Some reports suggest early communities of about a dozen, but later ones rather bigger. Probably it varied and probably the interpersonal dynamics couldn’t necessarily be predicted either. But essentially your Rule on this is for a community gathered in one limited place under a leader. In our time it’s common to speak of the global community. For this fortnight the world is attempting to gather as a community in Glasgow for COP26, a very different sort of community, but it is this one I am thinking of when I read chapter 70 this week.

Team Lees-Warwicker crossing the border in 2012, on Hannah’s End to End.

You were concerned about the way monastics treated each other. To make community work, physical violence needed to be contained. To back up this part of the Rule you used the quote I mentioned. But in our world we are constantly behaving like this, especially in respect of climate change. None of us wants an uninhabitable earth but we all contribute to the warming of the planet, thereby inflicting harm on each other: like a slap in the face.

It’s a difficult subject because it requires insight and self reflection; not something we all welcome. Those who say ‘I used reusable milk bottles when I was a child so it’s not me’ may genuinely believe that they are faultless when it come to contributing the carbon emissions. Unfortunately each of us belongs to a bigger community and through our shared membership we are inheritors of its history for carbon emissions and other planet warming activities. I may not take long haul flights every week but I still have a part in my country’s carbon footprint. My personal commitment to reuse and recycle is important but we also have collective responsibilities.

Janetstown in Caithness 2019: the whole world in not ‘mine’

Most people think they try to be kind or helpful to others. It is rarely enough. The Rule is not about some bland inoffensiveness that will get us all through life. It’s about a positive choice to live with others and see them thrive. And as far as climate change is concerned it is not enough to smile and suck our reusable straw. We must work on what it means to not do to another, country or continent, what we do not want done to ours. Rising sea levels: no thanks. Not for my island home or yours.

Our shared sense of community needs to get bigger and bigger.

From the remembered bible: Love one another.

Enlarge my understand that I may act justly.

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

PS: The blue trousers have walked many miles, including taking part in at least 2 End to Ends.

Obedience

Dear Benedict,

In chapter 71 your refer to one of the things I find hardest to contextualise for 21st century people: obedience. You were operating in a hierarchical society and your Rule about being obedient to those selected to lead was not something to question. In some ways these early monastic communities were the beginning of democracy. That’s an on going project.

Our 21st century world has many different ways of understanding obedience. In some places obedience is required on pain of death. Any dissent is severely dealt with. In others situations we have moved on from corporal punishment for, for example, children to the delight of some and the annoyance of others. Others find ways of seeming obedient on the surface but get round the rules in hidden ways. In yet others, obedience is demanded from abusive leaders who blight the lives of those they should be serving. So much then for obedience. It’s no wonder people find it difficult. Some rule with an iron fist and obedience is coerced. Other rule with a soft mitten …… (decide for yourself what is the consequence of that)

Some of the gloves I used to wear when I was a school chaplain…..

In March 2020 our Prime Minister told people to stay at home, due to COVID19. Some did for the good of all. Some didn’t because they couldn’t (low wages, no sick pay for example) or wouldn’t (libertarians who wouldn’t be told what to do, for example). Now with COVID19 infection and death rates rising again in the UK, the government would seem to have spent all its currency on obedience, neither side really now being content to trust its judgement.

So it’s amazing that we have now arrived at COP26, a large international, in person gathering about the Climate Emergency in Glasgow. Only of course we haven’t all arrived. Some have never set out, either because they can’t or don’t want to. Some are still in Rome at the G20 and will doubtless arrive in Glasgow having used less environmentally friendly forms of transport to do so (I really do not understand why the two meetings could not have been scheduled sequentially in the same place).

One of the things COP26 points to is the need for a new look at obedience: for us to be obedient to each other, and most essentially to those most vulnerable to climate change. Unlike the leaders of a monastic community we did not elect these people, but we did play a part in keeping them on the margins. Being obedient to each other is the thing we need to replace unquestioning obedience with. It’s the blessing of the most vulnerable that we should look for when we are caught out in our climate exploiting games.

We keep the Rule best when we readily give up any power or privilege we have in order to have better relationships in our fragile world which will lead to the thriving of all creatures. I am not more important than the earthworm or the bee (or any invertebrate for that matter) for without them I cannot thrive. I am not more important that one who lives on a small island in a rising ocean, for I do so too, or to one who lives sustainably in a place of ice and glaciers, for without their efforts I also drown.

A bee balancing

It doesn’t surprise me that the leaders a country that makes a lot of wealth out of the use of fossil fuels wants to alter the language of a report in order to endorse their right to continue to do so. Neither does it surprise me that large countries emitting increasing amounts of carbon don’t want to come to a summit in which they are lectured by those western governments who seem to see it as their paternal right to set the agenda.

What I don’t understand is why a teenage girl who speaks up for the climate and the action we need to take should attract so much abuse. It is those who will continue to inhabit our more and more precarious planet who we need to ask a blessing from.

Chapter 71, were I to suggest a bit of editing, would be about that. Honour the smallest, the least, the most vulnerable amongst you. Don’t expect obedience for obedience sake. No one should be ruling the roost with this Rule.

From the remembered gospel: Let the children come to me, let them speak for me.

O God open our lips.

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