I walk a lot and you write a lot. In chapter 7 of your Rule, you write that there are 12 steps to humility. It’s certainly a long chapter and one, as you might imagine, I have issues with.
Walking one step at a time.
I’m not sure how many people would regularly use the word ‘humility’ today. Like some other words in your Rule it has been left on the sidelines and replaced by more modern concepts. Self awareness is perhaps the most obvious because being humble is not just about imagining ourselves lower, but perhaps more about enacting equality.
Would you wish to be kissed after football match? It’s caused quite a row in Spain who won the cup but not the issue of equality. Of course, I’m not sure any country would be able to claim it had got that fully worked out, but in some ways, the issue of sexual harassment arising in Spain has granted it more exposure than if it was Iran or UK, for example. It’s now a year since street protests began in Iran over the death of a young woman considered to be wearing the wrong clothing, or rather not wearing the right clothing. In that year many others have been killed and injured in the resulting protests. Some consider what they wear to be a sign of humility but surely that is only true if it is freely chosen. Equality is based on informed choice.
In the UK various events across the summer have celebrated Pride, often seen as the opposite to humility, but in this case the capital letter denotes a particular kind of Pride related to identity. Even though now acceptance of LGBTQ identities are more widespread in the UK this has not stopped violence against those embracing such identities. In a country of choices some choices are still considered more equal than others.
Pride
Times change and 5th century Europe was a different place to the one of the 21st century. And so humility was the word you choose for your 12 steps. Self awareness seems to balance both humility and pride saying ‘I am not greater than you but I am your equal’. In that equality I can be gracious, grateful, and generous. I cannot be these thing freely if I am forced to do them from a down-trodden position. As it is I can choose to do them from an equal position. We are not forced to follow poor leaders but welcome the chance to travel with our equals.
‘Follow me’
And so, if I might suggest a rewrite, the 13th step is equality, faced full on.
From my remembered bible: Jesus said ‘Come with me’.
Let us start from a position of equality, one step at a time.
From a Friend of Scholastica, in Longdendale, 03.09.2023
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.
The eyes have it
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.
Ribbons on Roughfields
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.
Bowl at Stanbrook Abbey, Wass.
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.
At times I find it a struggle to read the Rule. It’s long (even the short bits) or at least longer than my attention allows, and boring. It’s easier to go out into the valley and look for fungi or geese or something unexpected.
I know that Benedict’s Rule is followed by a lot of people and at its most basic level I follow it too. I stick to the bits I remember and come back time and again to ‘Listen’. The rest of it I dip into now and again but sometimes I just leave it.
A table prepared in Roughfields, Longdendale
I first encountered people who did Liberation Theology in South Africa in the 1980s. I was visiting my brother, a mining engineer in the Transvaal. I went to see some people in Gaborone, Botswana, and they gave me the Kairos Document, a landmark in the opposition of the churches to Apartheid. I was hooked. My wishy-washy white liberal theology couldn’t stand the onslaught of the argument. It wasn’t just a case of not eating their apples, I found a much more political and justice orientated faith in South Africa, and I went back for more several times.
Eventually, after 1994 (we were there for the first democratic elections) I came back to UK determined to use my understanding in ministry. I practised contextual bible study using the remembered bible here for over 20 years, despite of vocal opposition and, more commonly, apathy. I wrote about my encounters with people using the remembered bible. I got on with the struggle.
These days my journey is gentler. I’m not so busy but I am still frustrated and angry with churches and church people who seem to think justice is optional, which is why these days I avoid them more. Justice is a still a fundamental aspect of my faith, and these days that means justice for those forced to live in poverty, for women and for those working to limit climate change. So, can you find this sort of stuff in the Rule of St Benedict?
I’ve not studied
it as long as some people so I’m not an expert. I’m an ordinary
person when it comes to the Rule but one with a background in
Biblical Studies and Theology so I know something about critical
questioning and interpretation. Even so, I’d say it’s not easy.
Benedict was writing in the 6th century for what were essentially self-sustaining local communities living together. Most of the time he’s concerned about what psalms to sing day and night and not about carbon footprints. Most monastic communities would have used local supply chains or grown their own produce. This was a pre-industrial age so no one was exploiting oil or discarding plastic willy-nilly. So of course, he couldn’t have written about that specifically.
The idea that a community should be self-supporting and engaged locally is now more popular again. So that does seem relevant even if other parts of the Rule are less easy to apply. Excommunication may mean something different now (say some) but it’s never meant much to me. Other say that they are able to apply the Rule to both men and women, but again it’s a struggle to see it in feminist terms. But it is particularly the lack of referents to justice that erk me. Leadership under the Rule is considered largely benign. It doesn’t self-promote, grasp, lie or abuse or do any of the negative things we equate with leadership failures today in both Church and State. Unrealistic you might think but then remember, this was the age of the saints. Benedict is writing about ideals. Everyone has a beam in their own eye.
Now we know that leadership easily opts for the self-promoting way and abuse of many kinds is a common coin across many contexts. This makes it impossible for some to engage with faith based communities at all.
In our own village, people from different churches and faith groups co-operate on a local level to support their neighbours with food, warmth, company and such like. This has been the winter of Warm Space in which a small bunch of those who are not economically active support other who are less economically viable by using free or reduce price produce from supermarkets owned by billionaires to make meals that our neighbours couldn’t afford to buy or cook for themselves.
Soup
There are those who ask me if this is real. Are their really people who can’t afford to live on basics, heat their homes and so on? Are they not just taking advantage of our generosity? When that happens I invite them to visit this village, just one small place in NW Derbyshire. I also suggest they try to get to know they people they live alongside better.
For me the Rule is
not my basic document when it comes to my response to issues like
this. I’m a biblical scholar and my go to faith resource is the
bible. ‘When I was hungry you fed me’. I’m not saying Benedict
wouldn’t do this too, although you might have had to wait outside
for a few days before you got let in. Benedict often quotes the bible
in the Rule, but he’s not a critical bible user. He’s not
concerned about who wrote it, when and with what agenda. Psalms are
for worship not political propaganda as far as he’s concerned.
Even so, it’s at a practical level we co-operate across faith divides in our village. We can serve bread with our soup but some wouldn’t take it from my hands if I blessed it and called it the body of Christ. Around the communal table everyone present agrees they don’t support this divide and want an end to it. What do I make of that? Why is the continuing authority of a few denying food to the majority, in both Church and State?
Making bread
This morning I made
some more soup. It was from left over stuff billionaires could afford
to pass on. The struggle is still in me, the struggle for justice I
mean. Will the Rule help me sustain it? I’m still not sure about
all of it but I will go back to basics and ‘Listen’.
From my remembered
bible: This is what God requires: do justice, love mercy, walk
humbly.
Although I started writing to you nearly two years ago, there were bits of your Rule that I missed out. I’m now returning to chapter 2 which is quite long so this is only about the first paragraph. It’s about leadership and especially the qualities of a good leader.
The Ruthwell Cross, an Anglo-Saxon sculpture remembering the ways of the Cross-Wise One
With Queen Elizabeth II having died three days ago, there’s a lot of talk around about leadership and especially about hers. This makes it timely to talk about the kind of leadership proposed in your Rule. Commentators agree that it wasn’t the kind of leadership that would have been familiar to folks in 6th century Europe. Look at it carefully and we can see it’s not the kind of leadership familiar to people in 21st century Britain either.
Community leaders are ‘believed to hold the place of Christ’. That takes me to the Jesus of the gospels, our human entry point into seeing God at work in the world. It’s a fair step from 1st century wandering Aramaic preacher to 21st century leader, on either the local or global stage. We talk about Christian values but often shy away from the radical nature of their demands.
Stone cross in field boundary, probably dating from 6-7th century, Cornwall.
Jesus was not upholding the status quo of the religious institutions of his day. He did not point to local or global political leaders as heralding the reign of God but to another kin-dom based on the activity of the seeds of small plants. Most of what is remembered of what he said (and it would have had to have been remembered before it was written down) turns the human ideas of that day and this upside down. He was regularly criticised for hanging out with the wrong people, often those on the margins of the the society of which he was a part.
We on the other hand take a pick and mix approach, choosing the bits we like and leaving the rest under the carpet. Former Primer Ministers may praise the late Queen’s honesty and humility and conveniently overlook their own lack of either of this qualities, for example. Or the new Home Secretary might say too many people claim state benefits in support of income whilst herself earning a six figure sum. These ways of speaking and acting are not, it seems to me, at all Christ-like.
Seen in Caithness, 2003
The leaders of the community you describe do not get praise heaped upon them, but neither do they get trolled. They are not expected to make a fuss but just get on with the role God has called them to. There is some similarity between this interpretation and the life of the late Queen Elizabeth, except for the reported 500 million pound fortune and the multiple large mansions. A Queen is after all a queen and inherits all the baggage of state and history into the bargain.
The monastic leader is not in this league, although eventually of course there were monastic leaders who got the wrong interpretation of leadership roles in the past, accumulated too much wealth or abused power in other ways. Some of these have been unmasked and the abuse of religious power was one of the things that contributed to the Reformation in Europe. Unfortunately too much of the Church is still rich making it difficult for some to see it as on their side of those on the social margins. It may be understandable to think that the worship of the Triune God requires our best; huge wealthy buildings and posh clothes, but there’s nothing in the gospels to suggest this and everything to indicate it wasn’t the way Jesus lived his life.
Closer view of the Ruthwell Cross, Dumfries and Galloway
When leaders are ‘believed to hold the place of Christ’ we might imagine him washing people’s feet, touching lepers, eating with excluded people and the like. These are not just things he did for photo opportunities. He actually lived like that: no home base, no comfortable existence. Most of our leaders, local and global, would not embrace such conditions.
It is said of the late Queen Elizabeth that when Pope Francis asked her to pray for him, she said she would. It’s the very least we can do and it’s an important beginning. If we want to see a greater Christ-likeness in our leaders then we must pray for them.
From my remembered gospel: The kin-dom of God is like …..
Pray for me as I pray for you.
From a Friend of Scholastic and the Member of the Lay community of St Benedict.
