Now and again, like every other reader, I wonder, "Why did I ever buy this book?" But, until online book buying gobbled up so much of the book market, only a very few times have I ever wondered where I bought this, or that book. Then there are those books you remember exactly when and where you bought it, and why. This book is one of them.
On holiday in New England, visiting very special friends Bob and Rebecca, in the Hanover Book Store, in the early 1990's, I bought Joan Chittister, The Rule of Benedict. Insights for the Ages. For a good few years I had been studying Benedictine and Cisterician spirituality. During Lent in 1984, at a time in my life when more was happening than was easy to manage and process, I worked through Seeking God. The Way of St Benedict by Esther De Waal. It was a book that considerably re-shaped my inner life, made me re-think the disciplines of obedient Christian living, and provided a new framework within which to practice ministry as care and commitment to community.
For several years after that I subscribed to Cistercian Studies, a quarterly academic journal on monastic spirituality with many articles on prayer, contemplative spirituality, and community formation. On occasion, I corresponded with a Trappist Brother who was one of the editors, and who had come across my name from an article in the Expository Times. He first wrote to me because he was intrigued to know why a Scottish Baptist minister was interested in a tradition so different from my own. I was quite intrigued myself!
Back to Sister Joan Chittister OSB, and her commentary on The Rule of Benedict. The first thing to say about reading this book is the immediate impression we are listening to a no nonsense counsellor who knows her own heart well, and who understands other hearts and minds. She is compassionate, funny, sharp as a pin, instinctively alert to the subterfuges and excuses we all make for our outward behaviour and inner dispositions. By leading the reader carefully through the text of the Rule she invites us to be honest about ourselves, to look in the mirror and see what is there, and not hate it. The Rule is a journey towards wholeness which is found in obedience to Scripture, simplicity of life, stability of standpoint, commitment to community, prayer as openness to God, to our community and to the world.
This book integrated much of my previous reading, thinking and praying about what a Christian life could look like if energised by a disciplined freedom for ourselves, and a commitment of love and service to the other. In the years since, Chittister has become a figure of international importance as a spiritual writer, peace activist and campaigner for social justice, equality and human flourishing. Of her many books I've read a few, but this one remains the most familiar as a source of spiritual commonsense, incisive directness, good humoured patience with human failing, and constant hopefulness for what human life can be when touched into fullness by learning to love the God who loves us first, and last.
Here is Chittister on the Rule practised in the obedient life of community:
"These tools of the spiritual life – justice, peacemaking, respect for all creation, trust in God – are the work of a lifetime. Each one of them represents the unearthed jewel that is left in us to mine."
"Life is a tapestry woven daily from yesterday's threads. The colours don't change, only the shapes we give them."
"God does not want people in positions simply to get a job done. He wants people in positions who embody why we bother to do the job at all. He wants holy listeners who care about the effect of what they do on everybody else."
"When we make ourselves God, no one oin the world is safe in our presence….Eventually the thought of humility is rejected out of hand, and we have been left as a civilisation to stew in the consequences of our own arrogance."
"When we refuse to give place to others, when we consume all the space of our worlds with our own sounds and our own trusths and our own wisdom and our own ideas, there is no room for anyone else's ideas…the ego becomes a majority of one and there is no one left from whom to learn."
My copy is so old and used the glue has dried and split. I go back to it often, especially to the pencil marked margins. There is a section on humility and leadership that was written thirty years ago, and which describes with devastating prescience, what moral failings of political leadership lacking in humility, truthfulness, accountability and integrity. Strange, that a Rule intended to create stability, sanctity and service in monastic communities, should speak with such psychological precision into the stress fractures that threaten our own culture's future capacity to renew itself.
Some books are for their time. This book is now dated in important ways. Chittister would write a different book today. I suspect it would be more outspoken, more angry at injustice, more resistant to the moral laziness and spiritual lethargy of personal piety and self-cultivation. She is now a loud voice in prison and penal reform; she is utterly fearless in calling out the ways culture and church dis-empower women; she is much more impatient with recalcitrant unjust structures and systems of her own church and wider society, that make change difficult and preserve the privileges of the wealthy, the powerful and the loudest voices. Having read both women, Joan Chittister now reads like the spiritual adviser of Madeleine Albright!
So it may be you would be best going for one of her more recent books. Her latest book, The Time is Now, is a passionate constructive critique of the current crisis of truth in the United States. Between the Dark and the Daylight. Embracing the Contradictions of Life, is an exploration of the ways life can become murky, lose focus and pull us in different directions. Then there's Scarred by Struggle, Transformed by Hope, a quite startling exposition of Jacob at Peniel, and one that has grown out of someone who gets it, the legacy and even healing potential of scars and wounds. All I would say is, if you haven't read Joan Chittister, an important voice is missing from the conversations of your life.
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