CHAPTER 32: The Material Goods of the Monastery

        Let the abbot appoint a reliable brother to be in charge of the monastery’s material goods.  This brother should be in charge of distributing these things as they are needed.  He should also be in charge of collecting them after they’ve been used.  And he should keep a list so that he won’t forget what he has loaned out.  If anyone should handle the material goods of the monastery in a sloppy or careless way, let him be reprimanded.   If he does not amend, let him come under the discipline of the Rule.

When I was seventeen, I burned a hole in the living room carpet.  I didn’t do it on purpose, but let’s just say I “wasn’t thinking” when I set the hot kettle of popcorn on the rug in front of the TV.  A few minutes later, my mother was standing in the middle of the room, looking at that blackened pit in front of the television with tears in her eyes, saying, “How much of this house do you plan to destroy before you finally leave for college?  Just let me know so I won’t get too attached.”  That was a few weeks after I had decided to juggle bowling balls in my bedroom and several months after I had backed the family car into the front porch.  I remember thinking “Geez.  I didn’t mean to do it.”  But in retrospect, I can see why she was so upset.  It’s easy to be sloppy with someone else’s stuff.  Saint Benedict foresees this danger in his monasteries, which is why he devotes three chapters to the care of material possessions.

Contrary to popular belief, monks do not take a vow of poverty.[1]  Nonetheless, Saint Benedict makes it clear that no monk is to have anything of his own.  But it is precisely for this reason that the monk must treat everything in the material world with extraordinary care: in his eyes, it all belongs to God.  Now apply this way of thinking to the world at large.  It is, in a manner of speaking, “on loan” to us from God.  Before long, we’ll be dead and someone else will be in charge of it.  Even the stuff we “own” will belong to someone else some day, no matter how hard we cling to it.[2]

So regardless of how you feel about ‘climate change’ or ‘species extinction’ or ‘resource depletion’, the natural and material world should be treated with enormous care because it just doesn’t belong to us.  We have no more right to burn a hole in the ozone layer than we have a right to burn a hole in someone else’s carpet.  It’s a matter of respect—not for nature itself, but for nature’s Architect and Lord.

---

[1] We also don’t take a vow of chastity.  But more on that later.

[2] I find it darkly amusing how kings in so many ancient cultures tried to hold on to their material possessions after they died.  Museums are full of artwork and armor that were buried with their owners in the expectation that they could enjoy it in the afterlife.  One Sumerian king even left instructions for his servants to be buried alive with him! 

CHAPTER 31, Part 2: The Cellarer continued...

Let him be in charge of everything, but let him do nothing without the command of the abbot.  Let him do what has been ordered him and not grieve the brethren.  If a brother should make an unreasonable request, let him not sadden the brother with a cold refusal, but politely and with humility refuse him. Let him provide for the sick, the children, the guests, and the poor with all care, knowing that, without doubt, he will have to give an account of all these things on judgment day.

I particularly like this bit about how the cellarer should respond to an unreasonable request.  As a teacher, this happens to me all the time.  I get an email at nine o’clock the night before a paper is due asking if I can recommend sources; I get a letter from a parent demanding the rationale behind a grade I assigned over a month ago.  Another kid asks for a 7am “help session” when he doesn’t even do his homework.  But what really gets my goat is when a kid asks for something they don’t need as though he deserved it.  I once had a seventh grader tell me, “This isn’t what we pay you for.” (As if he or anyone ever paid me for anything!)

To be sure, this is not a problem unique to teachers.  As a lifeguard in Galveston, Texas, I used to marvel at the stupidity of the people who came to swim at my beach: parents who napped while their children swam in the rip current, tourists who tried to eat dead fish they found on the sand, swimmers who would run screaming from the surf when they spotted a dolphin fin…  A guy once asked me (I’m not joking) if “that thing” was Mexico.  He was pointing at the horizon.  He couldn’t figure out why the water “just stopped.”

To be sure, it is a great temptation to answer with laughter or sarcasm or anger when presented with unreasonable demands.  But what real good would that do?  And who would it help?  Besides that, aren’t we always making unreasonable demands of God?  I stay up too late, speed off to work, and pray for ‘no red lights.’  Then, of course, I’m infuriated when the traffic is slow.  God is patient with our stupidity and incompetence, so shouldn’t we be patient with others’?  I think this is part of what Jesus meant when he said, “Be perfect as your Heavenly Father is perfect.”  God responds to all our idiocy with kindness, patience, love, and generosity.  Imagine if He answered, “Oh sure.  Like I really care what grade you make on your History Test.  Come back when you have a real problem.”  Instead, He says, “Are not five sparrows sold for two small coins?  Yet not one of them has escaped the notice of God.  Even the hairs of your head have all been counted. Do not be afraid. You are worth more than many sparrows.”  God is infinite, so you can be sure that some small part of Him really cares whether you pass your history test—and that part is infinite too.

Let him regard all the vessels of the monastery and all its substance, as if they were sacred vessels of the altar.

          This sentence deserves to stand on its own.  Theologically, it is one of the most profound passages in the Rule because it articulates an essential aspect of Saint Benedict’s spiritual vision.  For monks, you see, material things have spiritual significance.  This explains why, for over 1500 years, monasteries have been so prosperous.  It also explains why, every few hundred years, the monks have to save civilization.

Although the monastery is a community that is fundamentally devoted to the world of prayer, the very tools and stones and dirt of the monastery are themselves part of that mission.  By our vow of stability, monks create a place (called a cloister) where heaven and earth fuse together.  Nothing, therefore, that is within its walls can be considered “dirty” or “unworthy” of God.  It may be misused or misunderstood, but you can’t really write it off.  So when heretics or barbarians (or barbarian heretics) start to run around burning stuff down, the monk’s first instinct is to run around saving it.

Thomas Cromwell
Not a very pleasant fellow...

This happened during the late third century when the Vandals invaded North Africa, and again when the Christians of late antiquity abandoned their pagan heritage.[1]  It happened during the Iconoclastic Controversy of the 8^th Century and again during the English Reformation, when Cromwell and his buddies started knocking the heads off statues.  And it rather looks as though it might start happening again now that our own ‘intellectual elite’ have decided, in the words of Charles Dawkins that “Faith is the great cop-out.”

When, in time, this civilization of ours begins to crumble under the weight of its own bigotry and excess; and like every great civilization before it, it falls to pieces.  Even then, we don’t need to worry.  Because just as they have in ages past, the monks will quietly, joyfully, prayerfully pick up the pieces, store them in some safe, quiet place, and carry on.

---

[1] For more on this, have a look at a great book called How the Irish Saved Civilization.

CHAPTER 31: The Kind of Man the Cellarer Should Be

Let there be chosen from the brotherhood as cellarer of the monastery a wise man, of settled habits, temperate and frugal, not conceited, irritable, resentful, sluggish, or wasteful, but fearing God.  The cellarer should be like a father to the whole community.

‘Cellarer’ is monkish for ‘treasurer.’  He’s the guy who keeps track of all the stuff: clothes, tools, money, and most importantly, food.  Part of the reason you join a monastery is so that you won’t have to worry about these kinds of things; but someone has to keep track of them, so the abbot chooses a cellarer, and this is the man to ask when you need a new toothbrush or a new habit or a sack lunch.

In its own way, the office of cellarer is a powerful position in the monastery, which is why it is so important that he be humble, mild mannered, and wise.  Moreover, material things can be a great temptation, even in a spiritual community (see the story of Judas for more on that), so the cellarer has to be the sort of person who can watch over the monastery’s possessions without becoming too attached to them.

At the same time, however, this office is important because the things themselves are important.  Throughout the centuries, Christian sects of one sort or another have slipped into the error of believing that our existence could be neatly divided between the spiritual and the physical—that the spiritual world was good and the physical world was bad.  To be sure, the spiritual is more important than the physical (your soul is more important than your body, for example) but you have to be careful not to draw too clear a distinction.  To do so is not only wrong, but dangerous, because as soon as you start to scorn the physical world, you become capable of abusing it.  I think this is most likely to happen when Christianity is divorced from the Sacraments and reduced to a “religion  of the book.”   It is the Eucharist above all (that miraculous fusion of physical bread with the divine essence) that protects us from this heresy.  It also reveals a world of mystery and miracle.  When we have accepted this truth that all creation—both spiritual and physical—is good, we can say with the Jesuit poet, Gerard Manly Hopkins, “The world is charged with the grandeur of God."

CHAPTER 30: How Boys Are to Be Corrected

Every age and understanding should have its proper discipline. Whenever, therefore, boys or immature youths (or any who fail to understand the seriousness of excommunication) are guilty of a serious fault, let them undergo strict fasting or be disciplined with corporal punishment, so that they may be healed.

These days, we tend to shy away from corporal punishment, but in the Middle Ages, they beat kids like it was going out of style.  For that matter, they beat everyone: wives, criminals, adulterers, sailors…  There were all sorts of laws about who could beat whom and how many times and what sort of stick they were to use.  (If you don’t believe me, look up the ‘rule of thumb.’)  What is interesting about Saint Benedict’s take on discipline is that he is so careful to limit corporal punishment and focus on its purpose.  Truly, there are some people—kids in particular—who just won’t get it unless you ‘speak their language.’  A bully, for example, may never quite understand the gravity of his sin until he runs into someone who fights back.

Since my monastery runs a school, most of our monks have worked in the classroom at one time or another.  Each, of course, has his own stile of teaching, and some are more lenient than others, but there was one monk who had a particular reputation for strictness.  He had served in the armed forces during World War II, and a rumor spread through the school that he had been in charge of interrogating prisoners of war—a rumor that I’m pretty sure wasn’t true.  While he was lecturing, the kids knew that monkey business[1] would not be tolerated.  As I was walking by his classroom one day, I heard a kid complain, “I thought monks were supposed to be nice.”  To which he answered, “Attilathe Hun ravaged Europe.  He burnt to the ground a huge swath of the continent from Kazakhstan to France.  But he avoided the monasteries.  And that wasn’t because the monks were ‘nice.’”

Jesus Purifies the Temple, By Rembrandt

            Truly, Jesus had nothing to say about being nice.  But he had a lot to say aboutbeing good, and that was not exclusive of some very harsh words—and deeds.  Look for ‘hypocrites’ in the New Testament, and you’ll see what I mean.  And when you ask yourself, “What would Jesus do?” remember that freaking out, flipping tables, and whipping people are not necessarily out of the question.[2]  If strictness is what is needed, Saint Benedict is fully prepared to use every option at his disposal.

            Benedictines are peaceful creatures, but that doesn’t necessarily make them pacifists.  To be sure, we are the sheep of His flock.  But the flock needs sheepdogs too.

---

[1] No pun intended.

[2] I’m pretty sure I didn’t think this up myself, but I can’t find a proper source for it either.

CHAPTER 29: Whether Monks Who Leave the Monastery Should Be Taken Back Again

     If a brother leaves the monastery or is expelled, but then wants to come back, he should first promise full amendment of the fault for which he left; and so let him be received in the lowest rank, that by this means his humility may be tested.  If he should leave again, let him be received even a third time, knowing that after this he is gone for good.

      We must never stop praying for the return of our lost brothers and sisters.  But consider this as well:  there’s more than one way to leave a community.  Perhaps you and I haven’t ‘run away’ in the conventional sense, but aren’t there times when we abandon our friends in other ways?  We say something mean behind their backs, we sell out our convictions to popularity or power, we look in other places for the consolations we should be finding at home…
      And then there are also those private betrayals that we hide in our hearts—the secret glances, the whispered curses, the silent yearning for something (or someone) other than what we have.  Frankly, it’s hard to go a day without falling into one of those betrayals.  In the monastery, we call it “looking over the wall”—that temptation to be constantly imagining something better at the expense of your current happiness.
      During my novitiate (which now seems impossibly long ago) I made up my mind to leave the monastery and become a movie star (or a graduate student or a journalist or a novelist—I wasn’t sure which).  It sounds ridiculous now, but at the time, I had a friend there and even a job lined up.  In my heart I must have sensed that it was a dumb idea, because I resolved to seek the advice of the oldest monk in the abbey.  I found him reading the Bible in his cell.
      When I told him my plan, he nodded and smiled and asked, “Are you leaving today?”
      “Well, not today,” I answered.
      “Tomorrow?”
      “Probably not.”
       “In that case, my advice is that you try to be the very best monk you can be—just for today and tomorrow.”
      I didn’t quite catch his point.  If I was leaving the monastery, why bother with the effort of being a good monk?      He opened his bible to the Gospel of John, and he read me the story of how Jesus cured the blind man.  If you remember, he was born blind, and he was also kind of a smart aleck.  In fact, most scholars agree that he was probably a teenager.  At any rate, after he’d been cured, the Pharisees put him through the ringer: “What did Jesus do to you? How did he open your eyes?  Don’t you know that this man is a sinner?  How can a sinful man do such things?” And so on and so forth.  The ex-blind man didn’t really give them an answer.  He just kept saying, “All I know is that I was born blind.  Now I can see.”
      Later, after the Pharisees had kicked him out, he ran into Jesus and asked him, “So…who is this ‘Son of Man’?” and Jesus said, “You’re looking at Him.”
With that, the man born blind “fell down and worshipped him” (John 9:38).
     So here’s the deal: the man born blind didn’t have a lot of faith, but he had one great virtue: he was a realist—he stuck to the facts.  At any point along the way, he could have lapsed into cynicism, skepticism, rationalization, evasion, prevarication, theologizing, philosophizing…none of which are particularly bad in themselves, but all of which fall short when you’re face-to-face with the Truth.
     Still…again and again, we create fantasies and excuses in our heads, we grow dissatisfied with the gifts we’ve been given, we grumble, and we resent the people we live with; then we abandon the Truth to chase after vain fantasies.
      And then what?  How many times will we be allowed to return?  Seven?  Seventy times seven?  Saint Benedict says that for the sake of the community, the lost monk should be welcomed back only three times; but we know that God is even more generous than that.
God will never stop welcoming us back. 

CHAPTER 28: The Stubbornly Disobedient

If a brother has often been corrected and has even been excommunicated for a fault and still does not amend, let a more severe correction be used, namely, corporal punishment.  But if even then he does not reform, or, puffed up with pride, should even dare to defend his actions, then let the abbot apply the most powerful remedy of all: his own prayer and that of the brethren.  Then the Lord who is all-powerful may work a miraculous cure in that brother.  But if he is not healed even in this way, the abbot should dismiss him from the community; for the Apostle says: "Put away the evil one from among you" (1 Cor 5:13); and again: "If the faithless one should depart, let him depart" (1 Cor 7:15).  Otherwise one diseased sheep may infect the whole flock.

     I have a priest friend (whom I won’t name here) who was in a department store parking lot when this big fellow in a tank top walked over and started pushing him around.  My friend was wearing a Roman collar, and I guess this other guy didn’t like priests.  Well, my friend had been a mixed martial arts competitor before he entered the seminary.  So after taking a couple of shoves, he just knocked the guy’s legs out from under him and dumped him on his back.  Then he held him down with his foot until the security guards showed up.  The story circulated pretty quickly, and when I next saw him, I asked him whether he thought perhaps he should have ‘turned the other cheek.’  “I did!” he said.  “But I’ve only got two cheeks.  Besides, with some guys you just need to speak their language.”
     I think Saint Benedict would have agreed.  For those monks who wouldn’t understand stern words or excommunication, the Rule recommends corporal punishment. Times have changed, though, and I don’t know of any monastery in the world where that still happens, but I can see the sense in it.  You have to make judgments when you come face-to-face with sin, and knowing how to react is key.  Do you ignore it?  Do you point it out?  Are you in a position to stop it?  In some cases, you are likely to do more harm by confronting the sinner than you would by just leaving him alone.  Still, some sins must be challenged.
      To be sure, there’s a serious issue of pride at play when you start judging your friends by whether or not they are “sinners.”  But on the other hand, you also have to be careful that you don’t use “Jesus ate with sinners” as a pretext for partying with the wrong crowd.  After all, Jesus did tell those same sinners, “Go and sin no more.” (John 8:11) So there comes a point when you have to cut bait.  The trick is to know when that point has arrived.  You and I probably won’t have many opportunities to excommunicate anyone; and even if we did, I can hardly imagine a situation where that would be a good idea.  Instead, we may need to excommunicate ourselves.  This, however, is a last resort.  Every possible means should exhausted before we give up on someone.  And even then, we must never stop praying for them.
     Never.

CHAPTER 27: How the Abbot Should Care for the Excommunicated

     The abbot should be tremendously careful and concerned for the excommunicated brother, for "the healthy do not need a physician, but only those that are sick" (Mt 9:12). Therefore, like a wise doctor, he should use every opportunity to comfort this brother—in particular, by sending wise elderly monks to console him and encourage him to make amends.  They should do their best to lift his spirits "lest he be swallowed up with too much sorrow" (2 Cor 2:7), and everyone in the community should pray for him.
    Moreover, the abbot should always keep in mind that he is first and foremost a doctor of sick souls, not a dictator over strong ones.  Let him follow the loving example of the Good Shepherd, who, leaving the ninety-nine sheep on the mountains, went to seek the one that had gone astray.
     
      If the previous passages on excommunication sounded a little strict to you, then this chapter will come as a surprise.  Saint Benedict here sounds remarkably modern in treating disobedience as a sort of illness—an infection of the soul, rather than a flaw in character; and while he does allow for corporal punishment (he was, after all a man of his age as much as he was ahead of it), he prefers a more therapeutic approach, isolating the infection so that it doesn’t spread to the rest of the community, but tending carefully to the one who is ill.
      To be sure, the abbot’s first responsibility is to the community at large, but look how Saint Benedict guards against self-righteousness.  When it comes right down to it, we’re all sick and we all need healing, so Benedict isn’t just concerned for the wavering brother—he identifies with him.  He knows how easy it is to despair when you’re all by yourself, so he makes sure that there is someone nearby to look in on him—not one of his buddies, who might actually make the situation worse by encouraging him, but a senpectus (an ‘old-heart’) who will listen patiently, give wise counsel, comfort him, and drive away the demon of despair.

    To be sure, there will always be difficult people in your life, but when you find that you have reached the absolute limit of your patience, try Saint Benedict’s approach to excommunication:
* First, try not to speak while you’re still angry.  If you need a time-out, take it.  You may not be able to excommunicate the other guy, but you can always excommunicate yourself.
* Secondly, if you must avoid someone, at least be sure that you continue to pray for them.
* Thirdly, seek the advice of an old person.  Age doesn’t guarantee wisdom, but the two often come together.
* Then, last of all, keep on the watch for an opportunity to serve your enemy.  When the moment is right, do something nice for him.  Remember, no one is beyond redemption.