A Sign and a Choice: The Spirituality of Community

The Benedictine sisters in Erie share a rich community life centered in prayer and ministry and, under Joan Chittister's leadership, have become well known for their commitment to feminism and peacemaking. Joyce Hollyday interviewed Chittister while enjoying their hospitality.

-The Editors

Sojourners: You are part of a tradition that goes back more than 1,500 years, and one of the major aspects of that tradition is the importance of community. Religious life has always taken the shape of community. Could you talk a little about why that is so?

Joan Chittister: It's Basil, a Father of the Church, who says, "Whose feet shall the hermit wash?" That question is the basis of the spirituality of community.

The function of the Christian community in sharing the bedrock of Christian spirituality is the upbuilding, the co-creation of the kingdom; the bringing of the kingdom now, the bringing of now for the kingdom. So, like the community recorded in the book of Acts, the major witness of the new Christian community is the creation of an alternative way of life.

Benedict of Nursia, founder of the Benedictines, deepened his own spirituality to the point that he had a new vision of the Christian life. He looked around post-Constantinian Rome and saw a well established, politicized church. It was a church that had been made church by virtue of the baptism of the emperor and his decree that all his subjects would likewise be baptized.

An analogy would be an emperor who was a basketball player decreeing that basketball should be the only sport in the empire. So everybody plays it; but that doesn't make everybody a basketball player. So the emperor decreed that everybody was Christian, but that didn't make everybody a Christian. Benedict was immersed therefore in a "pagan Christian" culture.

Although the Edict of Constantine in 313 liberated Christianity in Europe, it also began the murky merger of the sacred and the secular. And that's been as much a burden as it has been a blessing.

That's the environment which young Benedict of Nursia saw 150 years later in the late fifth century in Rome. He didn't attempt to convert Rome. We have no history of Benedict of Nursia preaching in the streets, approaching the government, or going to church figures; he simply left Rome to begin an alternative way of living.

He provided a sign and a choice—not an argument or a program. And that sign and choice is the Christian community at the level of a radical dimension of love.

What is the radical dimension of love? It is the sign that strangers can become sisters and brothers in Christ.
And what's the power of this community in 1987? We've never had a more fragmented world, or a more pseudo-nationalistic world, or a more chauvinistic world. And so if monasteries and convents and intentional religious communities are a sign of anything, they're a sign that you can transcend all the differences, all the barriers, all the impossibilities, all the things that people say can't come together.

Monasteries are a collection of all the differences of the world made one in Christ. And that's the nature of communal spirituality. It's reflecting in the contemporary community, in the ongoing Christian community, what was the sign and model of the community of Acts.

Could you say a little more about how communities continue to be signs and models in contemporary society?

Any Christian community has within itself the possibility of transcending every institutionalized division against which the world is presently struggling. Economic divisions are transcended in communities with a common purse. Personal differences, meaning ethnic differences, are transcended in common living. Hierarchical differences, differences in power and wealth, are transcended by the creation of a community of equals.

Political differences are transcended in the gospels. We carry one banner, we follow one Christ, we develop one kingdom. And those are precisely the enigmas and the conundrums with which the present world is dealing. Those who say that Christian community life is irrelevant or out of date may well themselves be irrelevant and out of date. It has never been more contemporary, except maybe when it all started!

Prayer
Could you comment on the role of prayer in your community specifically, and in the life of any community? How have you developed a spirituality of community?

We all, I believe, accept the notion that the function of prayer is not to cajole God into saving us from ourselves. The function of prayer is not magic. The function of prayer is not bribery of the Infinite. The function of prayer is not to change the mind of God.

The function of prayer is to change my own mind, to put on the mind of Christ, to enable grace to break into me. So, if you're going to have a communal spirituality and witness, then you must have a praying community.

The monastic community has a prayer life, developed around what St. Benedict called the opus dei and what the churches traditionally called the "divine office," what we now call the "liturgy of the hours." It's the speaking of the psalm life of the people of God for our own time.

The psalm life has three dimensions: personal, national, and global. The psalmist prays out of the struggles of the psalmist, out of the struggles of the people, and out of the consciousness of the cosmic, of the universal: "All nations shall stream to you"; "You shall see the poor"; "In you are all things." So, this prayer life of a Benedictine monastic community is equally conscious on all three levels.

I'm here as an individual intent on contemplative conversion, intent on developing in my life over a period and process of time the ability to see with the eyes of Christ, and to put on the mind of Christ. I'm here as part of a community that claims to be a Christian community, and therefore has to struggle with its interpersonal agendas, with the life needs of one another, with being something other than itself. In order to do something, I have to be something. In order to be for someone else, I have to be part of a group. And then finally, we're here praying out of consciousness for the whole global community, for all the people of God.

To some the notion of monastic life is a phenomenally well-institutionalized narcissism. It is precisely the opposite. If and when it ever becomes that, it's at its most decadent. When monastic life is life only for the monastics, then it ceases to be monastic life. That's the paradox of it. When prayer is privatized religion on a spree, it's not prayer.

What is the contemplative life? In the first place, "contemplation" and "enclosure" are not synonyms. Enclosed communities are not necessarily called to be any more contemplative than my own community. Enclosure is a vehicle for contemplation. But so is stopping by the beaten person on the roadside.

The oldest mystics that we have in organized religious expression—the fathers and mothers from the desert, the gurus of the Sufi tradition, the masters among the Hasidim—all have similar parabolic insights into contemplation. There is a story about the master saying to the disciples, "Tell me how you know when it is dawn." And one disciple says, "Master, is it when we can tell the fig tree from the lemon tree at 100 paces?" And the master says to the disciple, "No, that is not how you will know it is dawn."

So a second disciple says, "Well then, master, is it when you can tell the sheep from the goats at 50 paces?" And the master says, "No, that is not how we shall know when it is dawn." Then the third disciple says, "Well then, master, how do we know that we have seen the dawn?" And the master says, "We will know that we have seen the dawn when we can see the face of Christ in the face of any brother or sister, no matter how near or how far."

That's contemplation. That's the fruit of the contemplative life. And unless you're putting on the mind of Christ, I don't know if you'll ever see the face of the Christ in the other, or the face of the cosmic, or the face of the people of God in the other. You may be a highly efficient social worker or a marvelously compassionate do-gooder, but you will not necessarily be a Christian contemplative.

Given all that you've said about the different ways contemplation happens, how important are discipline and ritual as part of contemplation, particularly in the life of a community?

I happen to think it is of the essence. It's profoundly important. Obviously we don't think a discipline of prayer can be dispensed with; we do it three times a day as a community. That's the essence of the monastic vocation.

I wouldn't argue that every community has to do it as a community. But I would argue that every community has to have a community spirituality, and that it must be regularly ritualized, so that in prayer and liturgy and ritual we are as able to express ourselves as a community as we would at supper, at Christmas, or in work. Because the spirituality is the bedrock of the community. We have to be formed in a common spirituality not just for the sake of communication but for the sake of common energy, common values.

In a monastic community it's imperative for us that as a whole group we call ourselves to spiritual development at least twice, and usually three times, a day; and that we be a place where others can come, knowing at certain times the community will always be in prayer together, and that they have a praying community to relate to as their own life requires it. I can't honestly think that you could have a community spirituality unless that spirituality were communal.

But I've also heard here a great deal of emphasis put on individual spirituality and the recognition that the communal spirituality is made up of individual spiritualities.

Absolutely. By communal spirituality and common values, I never mean a "marshmallow mind."

Religious communities, and monastic communities in a special way, are probably the only institution left in the United States in which every generation lives under the same roof. We have sisters upstairs in their 80s who have been in this community for more than 60 years! There is no way that the spiritual life of a 25-year-old can match the spiritual life of an 80-year-old. It doesn't make the 80-year-old's spiritual life better, necessarily. It isn't any more sincere or any more real than the spiritual life of our 25-year-olds.

But a 25-year-old can only have a spiritual life that comes out of 25 years of experience. So she comes in with her own agendas, her own angels to wrestle with, her own ideals, her own questions; and the 80-year-old has long since put those questions down. She has another full set of questions.

We each bring our own questions, our own angels, our own internal wrestlings, and our own special gifts to community prayer and out of community prayer to be lived in very special ways. We're not talking about a "common mind," we're talking about a "communal mind." And they're not the same thing.

In addition to that, in the Benedictine monastic tradition, preceding and succeeding the communal prayer is also the concept of leccio divina, the meditative personal reading of scripture. What is this scripture about? And what is it saying to my life? And the development of the private contemplative mentality comes out of all that. Communal spirituality guarantees the provision of an environment together for growth alone.

One of the things that has most touched me here is the sense of community that exists not only among those of you who are here, and not only among contemporaries in other places, but also with those sisters who preceded you. During the daily prayer, you often pray for the sister who died on this day in 1970, or 1906, or 1862. Being a member of a community with 15 years rather than 1,500 years of tradition, I sometimes envy that sense of history. What does it mean to have the strength of that tradition, what do you feel you draw from it, and what responsibility do you feel toward the generations that will come after you?

Well, you've put your finger very, very sensitively on what, for me, and I think for most of the members of this community, is one of the gems of the tradition and a piece of glue in the house. That is, we pray for two people every single day, and they will be prayed for from now for as long as this community lasts.

In the morning we pray for the sister who died on this date in any year since our community's foundation in 1856; and in the evening we pray for the sister next to die. So here you have a custom that very consciously links the great moment of community, the past and the future.

When people ask "How many are there in your community?" I always say, "A little over 300—about 150 of us are in the cemetery, and about 150 of us are at home." Our older sisters have lived with almost all those people, except our earliest founders; but they lived with people who lived with our earliest founders.

So all of that history is very much alive in the house. Why? Because we know who built the buildings that we all live in. And we know who's going to build the next set of buildings that we're going to minister in.

The irony is that this notion of the continuing community through time to the end of time becomes a very strong foundation for change. Because you are continuous, you can change.

Because so many went before you, on such a different path, you are freed to make your own path. Because if they did it, so can you. They survived, so can you. If they were made holy by it, so can you. It's a chain of memories that makes the future possible.

When we were facing renewal in 1970, after Vatican II, we remembered that in 1850 three young women left a monastery in Bavaria that was already 700 years old and came here to start over again. So, that prayer is a prayer of possibility and a prayer of support. Since it's happened to those before us, we will be with those for whom the great light is now. And some day our own great light will come and be appended to that list.

For instance, I entered the community when I was 16, and I've been here now more than 30 years. So in the chapel when we pray for Sr. Pierre, that first sweet old wonderful woman who showed us how to do dishes here, she's right there. I remember her.

Sr. Pierre was already a little sunken gnome of a woman by the time I got here, but very bustling, very quick, obviously the cornerstone of the house. She was what in those days was called a "domestic sister." She was a cook, and she did laundry and things of that nature. And she always had a wonderful word for the youngsters in the house.

In those days, the mother superior always put out the assignment book—we called it just "The Book"—on Friday nights. And you rushed home from school on Fridays to check the book on the chapel window to see what you were assigned to do the next week. Was it to wait tables, or to read the scripture, or to answer the door? I can remember standing at the book on a Friday afternoon, and I obviously was not pleased with my assignment. Sr. Pierre came by and put her little gnarled arm around me and said, "Now darlin', you be rememberin' this. When you come to the book and ya get what you like then Jesus give ya a hug. But if ya come to the book and ya get what ya don't like, then Jesus bends right down and kisses ya." When we pray for her in chapel, I say to myself, "Okay, Pierre, I'll try to remember."

It is often said that one of the signs of the health of a community is its sense of hospitality toward others who are not part of a community, and certainly the many times I've visited here I've been overwhelmed by this community's sense of hospitality. I would say that among your many gifts, hospitality is one of the strongest. How does that sense of hospitality relate to your sense of community and spirituality?

Well, it's definitely basic to the Benedictine Rule. One of the most widely quoted phrases from the Rule is the chapter on the reception of guests. It's a very interesting chapter when you consider that, at least in modern minds, the Benedictine life is seen as a basically ascetic, withdrawn, otherworldly mode.

But you cannot find the foundation for that mode in the Rule, which contains an entire chapter on the reception of guests. The chapter begins, "Let all guests who arrive be received as Christ, because Christ will say 'I was a stranger and you took me in.' And let due honor be shown to all, especially to those of the household of the faith and to wayfarers."

Now that's a key line in a fifth-century rule. Nothing was more dangerous than crossing Europe. Benedictine monasteries were the first Holiday Inns of the Western world. It was one of the few places where people could come and sleep well and not have to worry about being mugged, rolled, or knifed in their sleep.

It was a tremendous contribution to the western Europe of the time. You could cross Europe and stay in a monastery of your own tradition every single night, because they were spaced a day's journey apart. So for a Benedictine not to practice hospitality is for a Benedictine not to practice Benedictinism.

It's a very special gift, and I think it has an awful lot to say to our own time. The Benedictine monasteries were among the first to take the sick and the dying into their own infirmaries. Because death in a pagan world was a punishment, there were all sorts of taboos surrounding death. Barbarian peoples left the dying on the sides of the roads. And the monasteries were very, very quick to begin the first hospices, so that these people could die in clean beds in a Christian environment.

The chapter goes on to say, "When therefore a guest is announced, let them be met by the superior and the community with every mark of charity."

Now, what's the implication? They're not pests. You don't throw them in a room and ignore them. You make them welcome: "It is good for us that you have come."

The Rule says, "And let them first pray together." This is the Christian community that you've come to. And our first gift is to come down into this consciousness of God with us, so that we can get the most from one another. It's a contemplative encounter, an encounter blessed by the presence of God.

"And then let them associate with one another in peace." We're not here to contend. You did not come to be converted. There'll be no Catholic magic. No attempt to evangelize. No proselytizing. You will simply come as a creature of God, and therefore you must be gift.

"The kiss of peace should not be given before a prayer hath been said on account of satanic deception." That's not necessarily a reference to chastity. It's a reference to the notion of why you are about what you are about. This is not a human act. You're not here because you're friend or lover. This is the reception of the people of God to the place of God, in a godly way.

And then the chapter says, "In the greeting let all humility be shown to the guest, whether coming or going." In other words, no arrogance, no status, no display of pomp. "Welcome to my house." This is hospitality almost in the biblical Middle Eastern sense, meaning you are doing me the favor. I get to give something away. I've been given a great abundance. Now how shall I possibly distribute it, unless you come?

So the function of community is to make community for the other. For those who don't have the opportunity, perhaps, for community. Or for those who are without their own community at this moment. Or for those who think that no community would have them at this moment.

There's another great chapter in the Rule on the abbott's table. It reads, "Let the abbott's table always be with the guests and the travelers." When I was a kid in this community, we weren't allowed to eat with anybody and we weren't allowed to eat out. When we read this, I would think, "Huh, Mother gets to go to all the parties."

When I got older, I discovered what they were really asking of the Superior. If you are the sign and symbol of the center of this community, of its environment and its character, its ministry and its fidelity to the gospel, then you, my friend, shall be the sign of hospitality and community to every person who walks into this house.

And they shall all eat with you. Not in the kitchen, not with the help, not with the novices. They shall be received at your table. You are going to take them right into the heart of the community—the abbott who is the house, the abbott who breaks bread, the abbott who gives away what the community has to give away. The abbott who says there's no separation here, we don't receive you here as an inconvenience or a stranger. You are here as gift so that we can give.

I think younger communities can learn from your tradition of hospitality. When you're involved in so many activities, as we are at Sojourners, sometimes you want to come home and have home just be home. And welcoming people isn't always easy. But when I come here, I always experience the richness of that tradition and the fact that hospitality is indeed a commitment of every member of this community.

There must be some truth in what you're saying, because I've heard it from so many people. One guest summed it up with exquisite artistry. She said, "I always get the feeling when I come to this community that I am everybody's guest. You can't pass anybody in the hall who doesn't say, 'Can I help you?' or 'Do you know where the coffee is? I'll take you there.'"

As I listened to her, I couldn't understand why this was surprising to her. I would just take that for granted. Then I discovered that she is a businesswoman and a single parent; she's always doing for somebody else. And she is basically ignored in the apartment complex in which she lives. She carries the kids and the groceries up and down the stairs without any help. She does all those things that people have to do to struggle through life and expects to be ignored.

And then she comes to a place where everybody is expressing concern about her comfort. It seems to me, God willing, it does exist here; but if it does, it's because it should.

I think it exists because you don't just receive the guest, you receive each other in a way that says "I care about your comfort. I'm concerned about you."

I'm completely convinced that you cannot have hospitality in the community unless the level of the community cohesion and concern is high at all times. I have always maintained that the level of your hospitality will be measured by the depth of your prayer. And the depth of your prayer will be measured by your degree of hospitality. These three things are sides of a triangle—the members' genuine human concern and affection for one another; their opening that concern to take in the others who come; and the prayer and the gospel, which are the reason we're doing this.

On one hand you've said community can't exist only for itself, because it needs to exist for people beyond itself. On the other hand, I think there is sometimes the temptation among those of us who live in community to see community only as a base out of which we offer our ministry to the rest of the world. Could you discuss that kind of tension?

That's an important question, and not easily answered. It touches on a much broader and much more clarifying question of communal spirituality. Let me look first of all at what I clearly know best, which is the history of Roman Catholic communities and spirituality.

In the history of community life in the Roman tradition, we have two types of community spirituality: monastic spirituality and apostolic spirituality. Everything I have said to this point, I would argue, applies to both traditions, but monastic spirituality institutionalizes some of those qualities quite differently than apostolic spirituality.

Monastic life is communal life, and so is apostolic life, to a certain extent. But to the monastic, community is primary, and out of community comes the expression of prayer and ministry. In apostolic communities, ministry is primary. And ministry leads to the formation of community and the development of the prayer life.

Benedictine tradition says that the Benedictine charism is to seek God in community and to respond in prayer and ministry. The apostolic tradition says, "Our function as Christian communities of faith is to serve the people of God in ministry for the upbuilding of the kingdom." I think that is an accurate rendering of how most apostolic communities would state their mission. If you are a monastic, you certainly have ministries. And if you are in the apostolic tradition, you certainly have faith communities, so they're going to erupt in prayer. But the styles of community, the expressions of community in prayer, and even the ministry, may well differ, in order to focus on the basic element.

Community life as it's structured or expressed by a monastic community may not be at all the same as in an apostolic community. For instance, an apostolic order may live in much smaller groups than we live in. Or they may group around their works, where we would group around the community.

We would go to a place to be together, to be a sign of community, and then minister out of whatever gifts were there. An apostolic community may say, "This is a ministry that must be given to these people," and so those people who are capable of giving that ministry would go there. Each of those spiritualities will develop expressions of prayer and community. That's an important distinction to me, in reference to your question.

Your question points to another central question for all of us, which is, does the community exist as a vehicle for my ministry? I would argue that that assumption is false in either a monastic or apostolic community. Even when a common ministry is what draws us into the faith life and community, that does not give me the right to use that group as simply a touchstone for my own work.

The function of community life is for us to be and do together what we cannot possibly do nearly as well alone. Can you pray alone? Yes, you can. Can you pray better in a group that enhances and is a vehicle for your prayer? Yes, you can. Can you work alone? Of course you can. Will you work with more energy and probably more effectiveness if you're working with a group of similarly committed people? Yes, I think you will.

Will you be a sign of Christian presence and sense of community alone? Certainly. Will you be an even stronger, clearer, more capable sign of community if you're being supported by people who think about community the way you do? Yes, you will.

If you find somebody who thinks that the community exists in order to facilitate their own agenda, they haven't formed their communal spirituality. Communities don't exist, they're developed. And community is developed by community members. When I'm not developing community for you, and I'm simply using what you develop for me as a way to go about my interests in life, I'm not living community. I'm allowing you to create it for me; but I'm not living it.

I only live community when I, too, create community. And that means that you can't be the only person in charge of the guests. It can't be just your responsibility. That's when a community will get ineffective and unbalanced—when some of us expect the rest of us to keep it in existence.

That is not to say that everyone does the same things. Everyone doesn't have to be on hospitality, but we must all be hospitable. Everyone doesn't have to perform the same community task, but every one of us has to perform our community task. Everyone does not have to be responsible for the same things in the same ways, but we must all feel a responsibility for this community. No other sign of community will be authentic.

Needful Joy
Your community exudes joy and celebration. How is that related to your prayer life?

Let's look at three dimensions of that. A long time ago, the Catholic Church made the distinction between ordinary days and feast days. The church punctuated the calendar year with feasts. The whole notion was to lift moments of time out of the humdrum for special consideration.

Feast days were very important in early Europe, in an agrarian society that worked so hard from dawn to dark. The peasants and the serfs carried the entire economy on their backs. The feast day was one of the ways that the church, like the Jews in the observance of the Sabbath, brought equality to the society.

It was a long time before the 40-hour week. But the church said this great feast is like a Sunday, and therefore you cannot force these serfs to work. So it was free time. It was the first contribution to the labor movement, the first contribution to equality, and it was a profound theological contribution to the notion of hope. It was a sign that the victory had come for some, that life was a great gift.

Now you take that concept of joy in the Christian tradition and you add it to the concept of redemption and salvation, the Messianic prophecy, and you embody it in your life. You're not talking about cocktail parties, you're not talking about organized laziness, you're not talking about shirking your responsibility, you're not talking about being unreal.

How can Christians celebrate? How can peace people celebrate when you are looking down the barrel of a neutron launcher? How can you women possibly be happy when you live in a church that treats you as if you are less than full human beings? Because the victory has been won. And hope has come. And light has been seen. And some people have shown it.

So it's an absolute theological essential to celebrate. Any religion or any community or any period of history or time that wipes out joy and feast I find very suspect. More neurotic than holy.

Here the church has been faithful as an institution over time. No matter what warped spiritualities might get hold of the people, the church has always been a sign of joy and of celebration.

Now it's an easy move from that consciousness of the face of joy as a theological necessity to joy in prayer. Prayer is not a discipline. Prayer is a dispensation from the humdrum. Prayer is a chance to take a look at other things.

Prayer is a chance to sit down and reflect on something more important than getting out today's mail. The more sincere a Christian you are, the easier it is to fall into that bear trap, and, consequently, to lose a depth of spirituality that's tragic. It's a spirituality that corrupts instead of uplifts.

The function of prayer is to give expression to the signs of joy and hope you see. And it's also the place to count your real joys.

Now if joy is theologically necessary, and if it is provided for in its gentlest form in a regular prayer life, then it is clearly apparent in the life of the community. It has to be. You have a right then. It legitimates happiness!

There used to be this marvelous poster quoting Leon Bloy: "There's no such thing as a sad saint." And I believe Thomas Merton said, "Joy is the infallible sign of the presence of God." The celebrating community, then, is the community that rejoices in its Christianity and in the fact that it is community.

Community comes with a genuine respect and acceptance of one another as people. And you celebrate that. And you make it by celebrating it.

Play exposes us as people. Once you have played with all these people, you just treat them so much more gently in their personal lives, in community meetings, in the discussions of who you are as a group. Joy and celebration enable you to keep humanity in mind.

Joan Chittister, OSB, the author of many articles and books, was prioress of the Mount Saint Benedict priory in Erie, Pennsylvania, president of the Conference of American Benedictine Prioresses, a Sojourners contributing editor, and a regular columnist for the National Catholic Reporter when this interview appeared.