In step 4 particularly, (and to a lesser extent steps 5 and 6) the Rule’s transformative rubber meets the road. The text says "in this obedience under difficult, unfavorable or even unjust conditions, his heart quietly embraces suffering." There are a lot of different kinds of “difficult and unfavorable conditions," and it’s important to touch on each of them.
Victor Frankl, in Man’s Search for Meaning, referred to “noogenic neuroses.” This is a helpful term. Some neuroses, it claims, form in response to the frustrations of existence, rather than forming because of frustrated basic needs. Frankl claims these may not be neuroses at all, and can even be resolved fairly immediately, by troubleshooting our response to them. The Serenity Prayer asks for the wisdom to know the difference between what I can change, and what I can’t. The things that I can't change, the dynamics of life itself, are the things that do real transformative work in my life.
Before I go further, I want to talk about Brother Edward. He was the monastery’s cook—a work he did with tremendous selflessness, even during the final two years of his life, when he carted cancer around the kitchen. He tried to get us not to grieve him too soon: he wasn’t gone yet, he said, and on the cold days, what mattered to him was to get comfort food on the table in time for the noon meal.
I’m bringing this up because Ed was instrumental in my accepting one of the biggest helpings of “existential frustration” I’d ever been served.
It needs to be said that Eddie was Jesus: quite literally, in my early days as a monk, I once had an experience of contemplation in church, of the kind I supposed they’d had when the stranger had become Christ at Emmaus. When all of the mental noise that differentiates people from Jesus and one another quieted—at least for the few seconds before I began analyzing the experience—the person in front of me was Ed. But because I didn't see him as separate from myself, Ed was Jesus. But he was also Jesus for reasons that didn't depend on the seldom-given gift of contemplation.
Eddie was also the reason I know that monasteries can be places of great intimacy. Around year three, (two years into my novitiate, the second stage of formation) two things began to happen: I began to take the prospect of lifelong celibacy seriously, and God began to appear absent.
Both caused their own kind of pandemonium in my psyche. I began systematically dreaming of every girl I’d ever had a crush on. This happened so consistently I eventually made a list, and ticked off girls’ names when they’d danced across my dreamscape. The most intense infatuations of my adolescent life were harder to get over. Worse yet, the sparseness of the monastic life offered little reprieve. In the case of one college girlfriend, I did the majority of my grieving while shoveling chicken shit out at the monastery’s compost pile.
In its own way, “the absence of God” made my prayer life maximally unrewarding. That’s actually a slight misnomer. In truth, what began happening to me was merely the ceasing of consolations in prayer. Previously, though, pleasant feelings had been such a part of my prayer life that I’d committed the typical neophyte’s blunder of equating the feelings with God’s presence. So when prayer stopped being fun, God seemed absent. And God was why I’d come to the monastery. I used to say “God called me to the monastery, then he, himself, went to live in the Bahamas.
These two things happened together. On two fronts, my attachments were out of whack with reality. Eddie was the one to help me through all this. I had done all of the private crying I could, but my situation wasn’t improving. So I pulled Eddie into a small dining room, asked him if he’d consent to step into the role of “spiritual elder” for a moment. He made cracks about how few answers he had to give, but consented.
Dry-eyed and emotionally spent, I told Eddie all of this: the absence of God, the parade of former loves, and how it all welled up into a question: why the hell, I asked, had I come here?
Ed didn’t produce solutions. He simply began crying. “I’ve dealt with both of those things since I was a novice. It’s…so…hard” he said.
I replied “With all due respect to the formation classes here, they don’t really help me deal with this stuff.”
Ed made a dismissive “pfft” sound and rolled his eyes. Through tears he said “I haven’t cracked the Rule since I was a novice.” He pointed to his leg, which the cancer had swelled to twice its normal size: “Right now, this is my formation.”
That day, Ed woke me up to the kind of intimacy available in the monastery. True, if I’d stayed, no spouse would ever make moon eyes at me, but I would have the same experience as the 20 men I lived with, and some of them would even be willing to talk with me about it. By about two years later, I could articulate the fact that neither my positive feelings about God, nor the emotional crap of my grieving processes were indicators of God's presence or absence.
The fourth of the Rule’s “Steps of Humility” talks about continuing obedience under difficult conditions. Some of that comes from nowhere else but life itself. I carried around a lot of anger because I wanted the life to change: It was only in realizing how unrealistic that was, and then shifting my own paradigm, that I could access some peace.
We should talk about one other bit: Sometimes other people can change the frustrations but won’t, and sometimes I really need to self-adjust and don’t. This was the case when I was made “choir master.” I put it in quotes because it wasn’t always true. The second abbot I served under had been choir master before me. It became clear that he intended to part with the responsibility of accompanying 7 sung prayers per day, but not the authority of the choir master. With someone else to “cover the responsibility,” the abbot began sleeping through Vigils regularly—this is the earliest prayer, at 3:20 in the morning. So it became the case that an abbot was asking his tired novice to preside at a prayer he himself was sleeping through: This sort of thing SCANDALIZED. THE. FUCK. OUT. OF. THE. NOVICES.
As the son of a somewhat-famous liturgical composer, I came at the responsibilities with some hard-and-fast presuppositions about what good music was, and a real-but-slight chip on my shoulder about it. Generally the brothers received my work well. Every once in a while I’d push for change too quickly, and both the Abbot, and my Father, would tell me to slow down. Across the phone lines, Dad would remind me “Changing a community’s liturgical music is like changing the furniture in a blind person’s house. You can do it, but they’ll trip all over themselves for a while.” By and by, something became clear, across all the work fronts in the monastery: saddling the young with all of the responsibility and none of the authority—this was to be the rule, not the exception.
This was an enormous struggle for me: I thought, by performing my responsibilities as best I could, that I was acting as a choirmaster should act. But my performance was something my sleepy abbot routinely took exception to. By and by, the struggle was an entrance point into the fifth and sixth steps. I came to some grief by my own failure to accept that I’d have responsibility, but no authority. I came to grief by my own inability to accept that Abbots (who don’t live the Rule) will correct novices (who need to live the Rule,) and that will simply be how it goes. When I self-adjusted, my situation improved.
The genius of step 5, not concealing one’s thoughts from the abbot, is twofold. For one thing, it is good for me to take responsibility for a fault without blaming the situation or people that showed me I’ve got it. When I realized I needed to slow down and let the brothers’ needs—not my aspirations—determine the pace of my work as choirmaster, my serenity increased. When I realized that my living of the rule was my responsibility, just as the abbot’s living of the rule was his, my life got more peaceful. Talks with the abbot became easier as I realized, more and more, that we were simply two people who regularly fuck up an ideal. As the abbot, he could call me out for it. That’s just the reality of power dynamics. But delightfully, I could occasionally miss vigils, even as the accompanist for the service, without drawing the abbot’s criticism. I suppose it’s nothing more than an impish pleasure, but if you’re gonna make a mistake in the full sight of your superior: for God’s sake, make the mistakes he himself made yesterday.
Hypocrisy aside, when I learned to take responsibility on the one hand and selectively dodge it on the other—it opened my eyes to another dimension of the monastic life. In the monastery’s different industries, a lot of the older monks worked three jobs each. Because of their Trappist vow of obedience, very few of them had too much choice in the matter. And very few of them were qualified beforehand for the jobs they assumed. I came to see the abbot—and his underlings, like the monk who assigned the work—as men who had a certain number of jobs to fill. To them, the monastery’s various efforts at being self supporting were an understaffed chess board. All of us (from novices to ninety year olds) were pieces they moved about in irregular ways, trying to keep the industries afloat.
A quick aside: Ram Dass tells a story about a time he and Timothy Leary were having a disagreement. (It must be remembered that Ram Dass was named "Richard Alpert" at birth.) Timothy turned to to his own children, in a moment of anger, and said to them "I need to tell you that Uncle Richard is evil." This really got under Ram Dass's skin. A few months later, under the influence of LSD, Ram Dass had the courage to face the possibility that Tim Leary had been telling the truth. Under the influence of psychedelics, Ram Dass took a square look at, and accepted, his own capacity for evil.
Later Tim Leary called him up and asked him to stop by for a visit. Ram Dass obliged. During the course of the visit, Timothy said "You know, Dick, you're not evil."
Ram Dass responded with the calm of a man who'd accepted his own darkness. "If you hadn't laid that trip on me, I wouldn't have done that work."
I bring up this story about Ram Dass because it's how the imperfections of others act in relationships of obedience. When a disobedient person told me I was disobedient, I had to face myself. In the end, I could accept both options: perhaps I was disobedient, but no more than everyone else. And again, perhaps I can forgive myself for it, and I should forgive others without expecting to be excused from the ideal myself.
When a person has had an opportunity to get to know his own faults, and when he’s learned to take some power back, defending himself against those of others, step 6 comes in to play. This is when a monk “is content with the lowest and most menial treatment.” Certainly this can look like “taking a crap job without complaining.” But the clearest example I have of step six is Eddie.
As I said, Ed had cancer. His step six was not in taking abuse while he worked as the cook, and not in working a terrible job no one else wanted. Ed’s step six was to do what he’d been asked while he was slowly dying of cancer. I suppose, if Mepkin hadn’t had a farm, he wouldn’t have been so plugged into this. Ed, as I’ve said, had a radar for comfort food like no other. When it was rainy, or he knew the brothers had been working the various farm fronts in the cold, he’d simply beef up the “comfort food” factor, making sure the monastery’s main meal (the one in the middle of the day) stuck to our ribs.
Both dying as monks and in their home monastery—as opposed to, say, in a hospital or random old-folks-home—this is an enormous goal for the brothers. The Trappist vow of Stability—to die in the monastery where one made final vows—wrote this into each brother’s psycho-spiritual DNA: only under extreme circumstances could a monk “transfer his stability” to another monastery, and it actually involved legal paperwork. Ed’s cancer made his care a constant question. Would the brothers be able to give him the quality attention he needed? Please understand that there were very few signs of Eddie deteriorating. Ed took very few pain meds. He had a period of about 3 weeks where he needed care, but the day before that period began, he was in the kitchen preparing dinner.
There was a chapter—a gathering of the brothers for community meetings or spiritual instruction—when Ed stepped away from the kitchen. It was announced that he’d be handing over the culinary reigns to someone else. Briefly, the topic of our ability to care for Ed was brought up. Would we be able to care for him here? Would he be able to die at home.
At one point—I’d become an old hand at this—I interrupted the abbot. “Y’all just need to realize,” I said, “that if Eddie gets sent elsewhere, I’m switching my stability.” I’d shot from the hip, then promptly felt bad for interrupting, returning quickly to listening-mode…
Later, and in quiet conversation, I spoke with the community’s nurse, George David. George said “Ed might be a medical miracle. All of his doctors are saying he shouldn’t be physically capable of bearing with the amount of pain he’s in.”
Ed died about three weeks later. But before lucidity departed from him, he unceremoniously presented me with a hand-written note. He’d written it on the day of the chapter meeting. He referred to me by my monastic name, getting right to the point:
Br. Dismas,
You really touched a deep chord in my heart by what you said at Chapter this morning, saying you would change your stability to be with me if I were to be sent elsewhere. Absolutely beautiful. Truly this is what makes community life so wonderful and joyful.
Thanks, Dismas, for your love and all that you are.
Ed
In my home, I am the chief-cook and bottle-washer. I have a gargantuan stack of the school week's dishes waiting for me as I write this. I’ve mentioned this before, in Under the Influence’s June 1st post of this year: the framed note now hangs on one wall of my kitchen, opposite the goofiest picture of Ed ever taken: we called it the “gift wrapped for heaven” picture.
Ultimately, I can claim only to have made a beginning. I can claim only to have had hit-and-run incidences of steps 4-6, in my monastic life and otherwise. I am certain I know more of what I’m capable of, and the ways other people, when left to themselves, tend to act. But every time the feelings of defeat arise, about the apparent failure of my life as a monk, I take my hands out of the dishwater and read Eddie’s words: this is what makes life so wonderful and joyful. Even if I don’t understand much of my own life, I made a dying monk feel accompanied when it mattered most. When I’m being realistic about myself, and when I’m remembering Eddie, that’s enough.
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