I have often wondered how little of my life would have been spent in positions other than prostrate on a floor had I been more vigilant in following St. Benedict’s prescription in Chapter 71 of the Rule: “If [the monk] sees that any senior at all is even faintly perturbed at him or disturbed in any way, he should instantly prostrate on the floor at his feet to make satisfaction and remain there until the disturbance has been healed by a blessing.” There were over ninety monks in my community when I joined, each one of them senior to me. If even the faintest perturbation on the part of any one of them should consign me to a position of potentially perpetual horizontal supplication, would it not save trouble just to dig a grave and invite me to take up immediate residence?
Undoubtedly many of my confreres have asked themselves this question in my regard over the years, but that’s another story!
One can, and monks do, speculate as to why Benedict takes so extreme a position in this regard. Surely he knew that objectively it neither can always be the junior’s fault when tension enters into the affairs of monks nor can it seriously be maintained that being so extravagantly subservient to the senior’s whims is sure to make matters better. It’s not hard to imagine instances when greater evils would be enabled by kowtowing than by respectfully but firmly declining to have one’s life ruled by a senior’s peevishness.
My own guess in this regard is that Benedict would remind us that what might appear as obeisance has in it some elements of the Golden Rule. His apparent rigging of the system – the senior is always to be treated as if he were right – balances the rigging of the system that nature imposes – odds are, it will be the junior who buries the senior. And who will become in turn the possibly peevish senior for whom charity (and in this understanding the Rule) begs some mercy.
One example from my own experience. There was an elder confrere whom I often avoided, since he seemed to live for nothing more than to belittle his confreres in general, and ignorant younger confreres (he treated the two adjectives as synonymous) in particular. I had an explosion or two with him over the years, and in general our relationship was testy. During the time I spent in graduate school, I came home for Holy Week one year, and the first evening I had what I would usually have thought the misfortune to encounter him in the kitchen. He asked what I was studying and proceeded to pontificate on the topic. Though his generalizations were, I thought, dubious, I sensed he was trying to be pleasant, and so I refrained from disagreement and we parted amicably. The next morning, he suffered a heart attack and died. For several decades, I have been grateful that God’s grace kept my mouth from “defending my rights” the evening before. If acceptance of that sort of grace is what Benedict has in mind in these difficult latter verses of Chapter 71, there is perhaps more to be said for them than at first might meet the eye.
|