Can we find secrets to modern day balance in ancient monastic practices?

Soul Enterprise

Can we find secrets to modern day balance in ancient monastic practices?

Award-winning author and journalist Judith Valente looks to values and practices laid out in The Rule of St. Benedict in the 6th century to find balance in her own life. The following is an excerpt from her book How to Live: What the Rule of St. Benedict Teaches Us About Happiness, Meaning and Community.

I

often say I suffer from two diseases: workaholism and over-achieverism. When I was in college, I took to heart the ancient Greek definition of success: the use of all one’s talents in the pursuit of excellence in a life affording scope. I decided that is what my professional life would be. I was like a champion sprinter in a constant race to claim my prize. And the prizes did come. They would feel good for a week, maybe two, then I was off again, glancing in the rearview mirror at my past successes as I sped toward the next achievement, the next big award.

Friday nights would roll around and I wouldn’t have any plans for the weekend, because I was too busy during the week to make them. I often forgot to request time off at the holidays, and then it would be too late to get the time to visit my family. When I worked for the Washington Post, I often neglected to eat or get enough

“Leisure — relaxation and rest — is necessary. I would go so far as to say leisure is holy.”

rest. At one point, I had to be hospitalized for malnutrition and acute anemia—a truly ridiculous state of affairs for an otherwise healthy twentysomething woman earning a good salary. In short, I had a job that included my life, not a life that included my job.

In many ways, The Rule is a plea for balance. Monasteries in St. Benedict’s day had to be self-supporting, and still must be today. Those who live in them have to work and work hard. In previous eras, monasteries functioned as operating farms, growing the food they needed to nourish the community. Today, they earn income making a variety of items. The Trappist monks of New Melleray Abbey in Iowa carve caskets. The monks of The Abbey of Gethsemani make a rather famous bourbon-soaked fruit cake and varieties of fudge. The Benedictine sisters in Clyde, Missouri, sell handmade soaps, gourmet popcorn, and—believe it or not—gluten-free communion hosts. Americans work about 1,835 hours each year, which is more than they did forty years ago when there was far less automation. Yet only about nineteen percent take their full allotment of vacation time. Fear of losing a job, but also just plain workaholism might explain why.

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From the beginning, St. Benedict refused to let work overwhelm. He wanted his communities to be productive. He didn’t want people working until they dropped or as if little else mattered.

Idleness is the enemy of the soul. Therefore the community should have specified periods for manual labor as well as for prayerful reading. — from Chapter 48, “The Daily Manual Labor”

This line from The Rule is often quoted: Idleness is the enemy of the soul. But it is easily misunderstood. I think of idleness as the mindless piddling away of time that leads to nothing. That’s not the same as leisure. Leisure — relaxation and rest — is necessary. I would go so far as to say leisure is holy. St. Benedict expends considerable time outlining the hours for work and rest. Kitchen servers and others who are assigned tasks can request help so that they may serve without distress. In a chapter called “Assignment of Impossible Tasks,” Benedict says if a task proves too difficult for someone, after giving it a good effort, the worker can ask to be reassigned.

Judith Valente

Should they see, however, that the weight of the burden is altogether too much for their strength, then they should choose appropriately the moment and explain patiently to the superior the reasons why they cannot perform the task. — from Chapter 68, “Assignment of Impossible Tasks”

How many workers today would feel comfortable telling their bosses their job is too hard? Not many, I would venture. In 2015, the New York Times carried a lengthy story on one

of America’s most successful companies, Amazon. com. Amazon managers described a practice known as “Purposeful Darwinism.” It marks a way of weeding out employees who don’t work fast enough or don’t adapt quickly. Workers told of receiving calls from their bosses on Thanksgiving Day and Easter Sunday.

“It’s as if you have the CEO of the company in bed with you at 3 a.m. breathing down your neck,” one Amazon engineer told the Times. Employees coined a term for this type of relentless work ethic. They call it being an “Amabot,” a human apparatus that aims to be as resilient and fleet as the mythological character for whom the company is named. Amazon’s chief executive, Jeff Bezos, said the practices employees described to the Times do not represent the company’s values. He called them “shockingly callous.”

The Rule emphasizes that people aren’t interchangeable parts. The monastery, St. Benedict says, is to offer two kinds of food at meals, so the person who may not be able to eat one kind of food may partake of the other. Kitchen servers receive something extra to eat before they begin work so they won’t get hungry waiting on others and grow weary, or worse, begin “grumbling” about the job they have to do. ◆

How to Live by Judith Valente. Copyright © 2018 by Judith Valente. Used with permission from Hampton Roads Publishing Company.

Judith Valente has written four spirituality books and two poetry collections. She is a former staff writer for The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post and former on-air correspondent for Religion & Ethics Newsweekly on national PBS- TV. She gives frequent talks and guides retreats on the intersection of work and faith. Visit her at www.judithvalente.com.

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