cistercian TOPICS
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For a General Chapter
in a Prophetic Spirit (Paper written
in preparation for the General Chapter of 1971) During the last meeting of the Consilium Generale I expressed the hope
that the next General Chapter would be a "prophetic"
Chapter, rather than a Chapter with a predominantly legislative
concern. This suggestion seems to have aroused some favourable
reactions at the Consilium, and afterwards several persons --
Capitulants as well as other members of the Order -- have asked
me to clarify my ideas on the subject. That is my intention in
the following pages. I am quite aware of my total inexperience
as a "Capitulant" so that I hope that those who do not
share my opinions will have the charity to read them with a touch
of good humour. Our Cistercian
founders thought of our Order as a community, a sort of "larger
Cîteaux," living in fraternal charity its fidelity to the
same ideal. For them the General Chapter was founded as a means
of "revitalizing the bonds of peace and mutual charity,"
and where they might handle questions of "the salvation of
souls," and if need be, where they might decide what should
be corrected or added to the observance of the Rule and of the
prescriptions of the Order." It seems quite clear from a
simple reading of the Charter of Charity that the primary object
of the Chapter was living out in a concrete way their mutual charity,
whereas its legislative character, though admittedly real, was
of secondary importance. In the course of
the centuries it seems that the two roles have been re-versed
and the General Chapter has become mostly an organ for administrative
and legislative ends. In our times when revision of the whole
legislative organization is to be undertaken, there is a risk
of this tendency becoming dangerously over-emphasized. Is it not
a symptom of this that in the past several years there was a tendency
to suppress the reading of the Visitation reports, when it was
precisely in this element of the Chapter that the "communion"
aspect had been preserved -- although this element had become
perhaps sclerotic and a mere formality in many cases? From now on, the many problems that
the General Chapter is called upon to face, as well as the increase
in the number of persons participating in the assembly, will force
the General Chapter to revise its mode of procedure and the methods
of working together The danger here is to think of this adaptation
-- as also of the general government of the Order -- simply in
terms of administrative functionality. But, for a General Chapter,
or for the whole Order, or for a single community on the local
level, "good functioning" cannot be an end
in itself. It would be quite easy for the administrative machine
to run empty! The requirements
of the work to be accomplished in the past few years have forced
us to increase the structures (commissions, sub-commissions, councils,
committees, etc. etc.), and that on the level of the whole Order,
as well as of the Regions and local communities. That also carries
with it a danger, for it could easily lead to a sort of totalitarian
system of renewal, based admittedly on participation, but which
often ends up by killing spontaneity and, in the long run, participation
itself. The unfolding of institutional initiatives in order to
stimulate a greater dynamism at the grass roots often ends up
by inducing attitudes of passivity. If we go too far
in this direction, it is to be feared that chances for a real
spiritual renewal are going to be slim. A Chapter with a predominantly
legislative orientation works within a given system, recognized
and accepted as such, the structures of which cannot be questioned.
It is a universal observation in all spheres of human activity
that, as soon as a system becomes over-organized it generally
becomes intolerant towards members considered non-conformist.
By its method of procedure, such a system tends either to assimilate
or eliminate the "prophets," i.e. those who are more
far-seeing and sensitive to certain needs that call for a modification
of structures, or to certain demands that are too compromising.
In a short article that seems to have been too generally overlooked,
Thomas Merton has described with an exquisite sense of humour
– along with a genuine prophetic intuition -- how we take great
care in our institutions, not to let the Holy Spirit get out of
hand![1] And yet, the history of religious life is there to prove
that genuine movements of spiritual renewal were the work of charismatic
persons and charismatic communities (often non-conformist), and
not the doings of a committee ad
hoc. In the long run,
the most fundamental problems which monastic life has to grapple
with are not problems that can be resolved by legislation. There
exist tensions and antinomies which are essential to monastic
life, and which it would be illusory to expect to handle theoretically
by rules and regulations. They have no solution except through
a lived experience on the level of the local community. I cannot
forego including here a splendid citation from Martin Buber: "Man's religious situation, his
being there in the Presence, is
characterised by its essential and .indissoluble antinomy. The
nature of its being determines that this antinomy is indissoluble.
He who accepts the thesis and rejects the antithesis does injury
to the significance of the situation. He who tries to think out
a synthesis destroys the significance of the situation. He who
strives to make the antinomy into a relative matter abolishes
the significance of the situation. He who wishes to carry through
the conflict of the antinomy other than with his life transgresses
the significance of the situation. The significance of the situation
is that it is lived, and nothing but lived, continually ever anew,
without foresight, without forethought, without prescription,
in the totality if its antinomy"[2]. Quite a number of these antinomies
which are current in the life of the local communities are on
the Program of the General Chapter: Separation from the world
/ Openness to the world; Development of human values / monastic
asceticism; Authority and coresponsibility, etc. It would be quite
useless to set up laws, no matter how general they be, in these
fields. The Chapter, to my way of thinking, should handle these
questions from another angle. What do I mean ? To explain myself,
I feel I must first propose some reflections on the subject of
the authority of the General Chapter, looking at it from a wider
point of view: of authority in general in the monastic life, and
before all else, on the level of the local community. Even if Obedience
remains in its essence an evangelical reality which does not change,
the forms it has taken on in the Church and in the religious life,
in the course of the centuries, have always been conditioned by
the sociological structures of the time. The ideas which we formed
of it up till the last few decades have been the same as those
of Christianity in the Middle Ages. The "Speechmaker, you speak too late. Just a little time ago
you would have been able to believe in your own speech, now you
no longer can. . . .the masters smile at you with superior assurance,
but death is in their hearts. They tell you they suited the apparatus
to the circumstances, but you notice that from now on they can
only suit themselves to the apparatus - so long, that is to say,
as it permits them"[3]. In times past, monks played the part
of pioneers in this field. It is a matter of common knowledge,
for example, that democratic representation is a monastic invention,
and the British Parliament borrowed a great deal of its structure
from the model of the Charter of Charity of Cîteaux.[4] It would be regrettable to see adopted today without
distinction, a sort of parliamentarianism, several centuries late
and just at the moment when this form of government is on the
point of disappearing... Since the Council,
a great need has been felt of having everyone actively participate
in the life of the Community. Fine! But as our ideas of government
and authority remained unchanged, this has only ended up in complicating
tremendously the administrative machinery, in order to have as
many as possible take part in it. This has led to a sort of cancerous
multiplication of commissions, committees, etc... But it isn't
certain that we succeeded in interesting very many people in government,
or even in participation itself. Just the same,
I do not want my intentions to be misconstrued. My opinion is
not that we have gone too far, but not far enough -- and I understand
this "not-far-enough" as a question of kind and not quantity. For to my mind, the true meaning of evangelical communion
goes far beyond mere democracy and governmental participation.
As long as we think in terms of these categories, we are bound
to maintain the old dichotomy between the community on one side,
and authority on the other -- looked upon, more or less explicitly,
as something exterior to it. For the fact that authority is shared
by a more or less great number of persons or organisms changes
nothing in the system. At the utmost even if an experiment of
a Community without a superior should be tried out, the same system
still holds if the deliberating numbers of a group consider authority
as something exterior to and above each of the persons making
up the group. For all that, a koinonia does not necessarily exist, and
everyone knows how the dictatorship of a majority can be even
more uncompromising than that of a single person. A community is
essentially a grouping of brothers or sisters who are "called"
-- each one, personally -- by God. They unite in order to be mutually
responsible for each other, to share together their ideal, their
search, their groping, their spiritual experience, their interpretations
of God's Word in the daily events of life, etc. Christian obedience consists in accepting
the will of God as one's own. Obedience in a community or coenobitical
life consists in accepting to read the will of God in one's brothers,
in admitting to be conditioned by a Community of brothers in one's
spiritual conduct. The ideal community-the one where people would
be "one heart and one spirit" -- would, of course, need
no superior, for it would live its obedience in a complete and
continual consensus. (The submission to hierarchical authority,
which was given by Christ to the Apostles and to their successors,
is a question of another sort altogether.) But as the ideal Community
does not exist, our religious communities normally must have in
their midst - and I emphasize in their midst
and not over them -- a member of the fraternity to whom they confide the
role of helping the community in its search for the will of God,
and of guiding it in the up-building of that consensus. And in contrast
to the ideal community, there is to be found the community --
and it is not at all an imaginary situation -- where the existence
of the communion and the links of cohesion are so weak or inexistent
that the consensus, and even the search of such consensus, or
the common effort to heed the Word of God, would not be possible.
The only solution in this case would be to hand over to someone
the business of making decisions in the name of all... which corresponds
more or less to the notion quite commonly held of authority and
obedience. But isn't that a case of erecting into a system a way
of exercising "authority" required by the abnormal situation
of a community life in a state of degeneracy? "You know that
among the pagans the rulers lord it over them and their great
men make their authority felt. This is not to happen among you."
(Mt. 20:25-26). In a community
where community life is lived intensely enough, the role of the
"superior," so-called, should be a role of animation... And here I open
a parenthesis to explain that, after consulting with an expert
in English literature, I decided to continue to use this neologism,
even if for some readers this term "animation" might
evoke Donald Duck, Walt Disney or cartoon characters. It should
be remembered that sociologists and scientists of allied fields
are using this term increasingly in the sense given it by their
French colleagues. The word "animation" generally refers
to an "in-spiriting" or "life-imparting" experience;
a form of leadership which consists in arousing or awakening the
development of latent energies of a group, and in being a unifying
and cohesive factor in the development and auto-formation of such
a group. In social animation, the animator is the
person who, after taking the pulse of a group, acts as pacesetter,
facilitator and catalyst for the individuals and the group. All
this and more is implied in the case of the "spiritual animator."
The spiritual animator is a pacesetter in that he proclaims the
Lord's message by his life. He takes the pulse of the group and
of individuals to discern where the Spirit is leading them, and
as a catalyst he facilitates the Lord's activity in and through
the group members. He does not impart life but serves as a channel
and instrument for the Source and Giver of life in its fullness.[5] The animator does not make the decisions
for the group; he helps the group make them -- not in the manner
of a president of an assembly who proposes an issue to the vote
of all, but as a sort of catalyst of individual energies which
facilitate the movement toward a consensus by the group. The group
will also expect that he act as its "conscience" by
being the "memory" of the common options, already agreed
upon or previously taken. Or again, to use an expression of Paul
Claudel, he will be the délégué
à l'attention, i.e. the one who is delegated to be attentive in the name of
all, whose duty is to recall to the attention of the brethren
their commitments, their duties, their faults, responsibilities...
a role which corresponds rather nearly to that of the prophet
in the Bible. To my mind, the
mental picture or image of an "Abbot-father" or an "Abbot-teacher"
is attached to a set of sociological contexts belonging to another
age, and to try to cultivate it in this day and age may combine
in generating or supporting ambiguities. And that without taking
into account that these terms correspond to a kind of relationship
which, by its very nature, excludes complete reciprocity.[6] I explained above
how the ideas of authority and obedience at the different stages
of the history of religious life depended on the sociological
situation of the times. What this was at the time of St Benedict,
or that of Cîteaux, corresponds pretty much to the description
of the society of those times, given us by one of the best sociologists
of our time, Andrew Greeley: "In the Teutonic
tribe or the medieval feudal manor, the leader was a man who,
by virtue of superior wisdom, or superior strength, or both, was
expected to know all the answers to the problems that the community
might face. His followers did not have to understand either the
problems or the answers; it was merely enough for them to accept
his wisdom and/or strength, and to respond to his instructions.
In simple societies, where skills are not complex and information
gathering is relatively simple, the "answer-giving"
leader is all that is required".[7] From the point
of view of the sociologist, monasteries at the time of St Benedict
corresponded pretty well with this description. They needed such
a leader: a father, a master, a teacher who asked the questions
and gave the answers. Always from the same point of view of sociology,
the situation in which we find ourselves today is quite different.
I borrow its description from the same source. "But in the modern world, no single man van be expected
to have either the information or the skills necessary for making
decisions. He must rely on the collaboration of both technical
experts and representatives of the rank and file of his organization
to provide him with the information and skills without which adequate
decisions cannot be made. Decision making, then, in the modern
world, is essentially a collegial process and the leader frequently
does little more than ratify the decision that has been made jointly
by his followers and his technical advisers. The real challenge
of leadership, then, is rather different. Unlike the leader of
the simple society, the leader of an organization in a complex
society must ask questions, not provide answers. He has been chosen
as leader precisely because he is expected to have clear insights
into the values that an organization is pursuing, and the ability
to ask penetrating questions about how successful the organization
is in its pursuit of its values. "The leader
is a man who sees the "big picture," the man who has
the "vision" of the purpose of the organization, a vision
on which he relies to challenge his followers to look beyond their
individual, day-to-day goals and think about their common purposes.
It is a leader's job, then, to prophesy, to challenge, to question,
to refuse to be content with complacency, mediocrity or dullness.
In his own vision and enthusiasm, he incarnates the purposes of
the organization; he symbolizes its values. "It is easy
to answer questions. But to ask questions and to preside over
the communal consensus of response to those questions is far more
difficult. Paradoxically enough, the leader who asks questions
and presides over consensus has far more power in the organization
than does the man who is content merely with providing responses
to questions, for the latter is very likely to find that those
who ask the questions do not really take his answers very seriously.[8]" Would it represent
a depreciation of the virtue of obedience to understand in this
manner the exorcise of authority in a monastic community? I do
not think so. All obedience is directed finally to God. The mediations
to which man binds himself in his seeking God's will are human
structures that he forms to reach the knowledge of this divine
will. And so those structures must be adapted concretely to the
psychological and sociological needs of the persons for whom they
were established. In today's communities, where ail have a sufficient
education, where there are several who can teach and guide their
brothers much better than the abbot in many fields, and where
all are invited to reflect on the orientations, present or to
come, of the religious life and of the Order, what we need are
prophets, leaders who can ask the telling questions, who can bring
their brothers an intuitive and global vision of the monastic
ideal and the demands of the time, who can prick the consciences
of their brothers and help them read God's will, to accept freely
and community-wise its demands. Is "obedience" anything
but this "reading" and this acceptance of God's will? Thus it is evident
that the function of the superior cannot be limited to that of
a distributing-machine for permissions and orders, nor to that
of a professor of monastic spirituality. At the same time it is
clear that the function of animator, of which I have spoken, is
capital for the renewal of monastic life. It would be dangerous
and sterile to work out structures which would suppress such a
personal role, or lessen it to the extreme limit, in such wise
that all the function of leadership would end up with commissions
or impersonal organisms. All this may seem
irrelevant to the question of the General Chapter. And yet it
is not. For our idea of the role of the latter will be in function
to our concept of authority, in the same way that our idea of
the Order will depend on the one we have of the local community. A monastic Order
is not an organization, but a living organism. It is not a society,
but a community of communities. Their bond of union is their working
towards a common ideal or plan, and communion in pursuing and
putting to effect that common ideal. This communion presupposes
and demands exchanges of every type. In all events, it is the
primary and fundamental reality in the Order -and not the existence
of a central government, which is rather to serve this communion.
If the latter were not a living reality, bonds on the juridical
plane would be a fiction. And that is why our efforts towards
renewal should aim at intensifying the communion between the (individual)
communities much more than at oiling the cogs of an administrative
machine. The General Chapter
should then, above all, be an instrument of this fraternal communion.
But by this I mean much more than simply the fart of meeting on
a fraternal basis of sympathy and affection. The important thing
for those who are the délégués à l'attention in their respective communities, is to meet in order to be attentive together
to the Spirit, to confront their "vision" of the monastic
project, to render themselves more sensitive to the problems of
the monastic life and of the Church as a whole, to "take
the pulse" of the Order and to come to a more lively awareness
of the movements and aspirations existing in the Order. From this
point of view, the Chapter will have an eschatological orientation
as well, in the sense that the eschatological is there when you
have matters where the end is already in the beginnings, or implied
in them. Such a Chapter will be a communal effort of awareness
(conscientization) on the plane of the
Order. It will give attention and sympathy to all the new movements,
either in the Order or in the monastic life in general, quite
aside from whether or not those movements could be accepted in
the Order. Prophetic writings, like some of Merton's texts, should
be examined and meditated together. We should be attentive in
all humility to whatever is thrown as a challenge to monks, either
in the world or in the Church today: the rapid growth of the charismatic
Christian communities (communautés
de base), the hippie movement, the seeking for spiritual experience
by the use of drugs, life in "communes," the attraction
of oriental spirituality on the young, etc. For it is in function
of this whole context that monastic life must be re-examined today. A General Chapter
is a human group and, as such, needs certain structures established
by legislation. And it is the same thing for the Order itself.
But we must not forget that the purpose of such legislation and
structures is simply to give character and stability to
our conduct in matters of minor importance (nos comportements
accidentels), in order to release all one's attention for
the basic issues. It would be an upheaval of values if the General
Chapter devoted a large part of its energy to its own functioning
and machinery. It seems to me
that all this can influence the question of the Constitutions.
During the last Chapter I tried to draw attention to the danger
of canonizing in the Constitutions a sort of "official theology"
of Cistercian monastic life. It
was a little bit the orientation of the New Charter
of Charity, a plan that anyway has been set aside. But it seems
to me that in the projects that are circulating at present, there
are other dangers: that of expressing the fundamental values of
religious life, or of Cistercian spirituality, by means of juridical
prescriptions, and that of wanting to solve by legislation the
antinomies of which I spoke above, and which cannot be solved
outside of the actual life. I am wondering too, if we are not
"wasting," in a certain manner, a large sum of precious
energy in trying to find a form for Constitutions, the contents
of which will be made known to us only by the experience of the
years to come. At the same time this allows me to
give a word of explanation on my article "The Cistercian
Nuns at the Crossroads." If there I was trying to show the
advantages of juridical autonomy for our Sisters, it was because
I was not envisaging the possibility in fact of a change in orientations
for the General Chapter of the monks before a number of years.
It seemed to me then that to establish mixed General Chapters
-- with all that this implies from a juridical point o£ view --
was to devote a considerable sum of energy to getting structures
under way that were destined to disappear a few years later. If
the General Chapter takes, this very year, the direction that
the Consilium Generale seems to have wanted, that is to say, if
it becomes more and more an instrument of communion and less one
of government, the question of relations between the two branches
of the Order will take on a different colour, as Dom Flavian has
pointed out to us in his letter of March 4, 1971 The Regional Conferences have been,
up to now, in a very large measure what it seems to me the General
Chapter should become. They are essentially an instrument of communion
and of awareness (conscientization).
They allow the representatives of the different communities to
become aware together of life as it is lived in the Region. Between
Chapters, the Consilium Generale could in its turn be a very useful
instrument of communion between the Regions. There is no objection
to considering the same Consilium as a means for the Regions to
participate in the decisions concerning the whole Order, which
might become necessary between the Chapters. But this "government"
function would have to remain secondary and subordinate to the
one of communion. If, as it has been proposed, the Consilium
Generale is formed by the Regional Presidents, then their role
should take on a new character. It seems to me that the President
of each Region should make a point of keeping up with everything
that takes place in the Region: the hopes, the tensions, the new
experiments, likewise with sociological and ecclesiastical evolution,
and with the orientations of religious life as a whole, etc....
And after every meeting of the Consilium Generale, he should inform
the whole Region of what he has learnt and discovered during the
meeting, and of the new outlook that he has on the monastic vocation,
and on its demands before God today. As for the role
of the Abbot General, his function within the Order seems to me
more and more important. That he be freed as much as possible
from all kinds of administrative tasks is undoubtedly an excellent
thing. But I believe that it is very important that we keep within
the Order someone who fulfils for it the role of "animator,"
that is, the function of the local abbot in his community. It
seems to me that there lies the role that is needed for the Abbot
General. It can be very useful for the Order to have an Abbot
General who visits the communities -- not to make canonical Visitations
-- but to enter into personal contact with each member of the
Order, to be a bond of fraternal communion by the warmth of his
human relations; to create, for instance, links of friendship
by causing contacts between persons living in different latitudes,
but who have the same preoccupations. In this way he could become
sensitive to the problems and aspirations of each one, and help
each one to become aware of the problems and aspirations of all.
That is certainly a role that might be called “prophetic” and
could in no way be entrusted to a commission or to some organism. * * * In the history
of the Church there are two types of reform. At certain periods,
for instance the XIIth century, we see a tidal wave, an irresistible
movement of the Spirit which brings about an awareness, generally
and universally, of certain Gospel-values and of new needs in
the Church. This charismatic movement then raises up a fresh life,
the energy of which cracks open the old structures and generates
new ones. At other times the need for reform and renewal is apparent
only to an élite, more intuitive and clear-sighted, which uses
its influence to change the structures and to bring the others,
in this indirect way, to a new awareness. Perhaps it is more particularly
to this latter type that the renewal in the Church and in the
Order since Vatican II would belong. But it might well be dangerous
to go too far in this direction, because to make the structures
and legislation into pedagogical instruments would be to deviate
both from their purpose. It seems to me more important today to
devote all our energy to an effort of "awareness - taking"
(conscientization).
What we need is a charismatic renewal and not a technocratic reform.
That is why I think we need a Chapter of a prophetic nature much
more than a legislative one. Would it be utopian to hope for it? March 19, 1971 [1] Thomas Merton. "Final Integration : Toward a 'Monastic
Therapy'." Monastic
Studies, n 6, 1968, pp 87-99 -- especially 95-96. [2] Martin Buber. I and Thou.
N.Y: Charles
Scribners Sons, 1958 (2d ed, paperback), p 95. [3] Ibid, p
48 [4] Cf Jean-Jacques Walter, « L'Abbé et les formes modernes de l'autorité », in Collectanea Cisterciensia, 31, (1969),
pp 161-163. [5] Cf NOTE in Bulletin of the Canadian Religious Conference, December 1970. [6] Cf Martin Buber's Address, "Education" in Between Man & Man. N.Y: Macmillan Paperbacks
Edition, 1965, pp 83-113. [7] Andrew Greeley. "Sociology and Church Structure,"
in Concilium. N.Y:
Herder & Herder, 1970 (October), n 58. Burns £ Oates: 1970
(Oct), vol. 8, n.6, p.27. [8] Ibid, p. 28 |
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