Echoes from the Bell Tower

“...let us proceed, with God’s help, to lay down a rule for the strongest kind of monks, the Cenobites.”

RB 2—On the Kinds of Monks

In the second chapter of his Rule, St. Benedict describes the “kinds of monks”. He writes of Cenobites, the kind Benedictines are, as those living a shared life in community under the authority of an abbot and a rule. He calls these the “strongest kind”. But he also has high praise for the “anchorites” or hermits. A hermit is a man or woman who lives the “eremitic” life by seeking God in the wilderness. The word for desert in Greek (the original New Testament language) is eremos – it’s the root of our English word “hermit”. Eremos is a word that conveys a deserted, solitary place or wilderness; a dangerous environment fraught with threats to life – lack of fresh water and food, a landscape filled with poisonous plants and cavernous pit-falls, wild animal predators and human ones too – in ancient times, bandits and highway robbers lay in ambush along isolated roads between towns and villages.

This passage from Benedict’s rule suggests a tension between what he calls the “strongest” kind of monks, the cenobites, and the hermits. But the tension is only apparent. For Benedict, no one can “fight the good fight” without being tested in the gristmill of community. He writes that hermits are those who, no longer in the first fervor of their reformation, but after long probation in a monastery, having learned by the help of many brethren how to fight against the devil, go out well armed from the ranks of the community to the solitary combat of the desert. They are able now, with no help save from God, to fight single-handed against the vices of the flesh and their own evil thoughts.

But the desert is not essentially a place outside of us, but a landscape one finds within. The interior landscape of mind and heart is where God does his work to shape and “reform” us, forming us in the image of his Son, Jesus Christ. I believe the desert is found within. From that interior vantage point I can look out, peering into the “wilderness” of this world, and see its dangers more clearly. When I entrust myself to Christ in faith, and learn to rely on God’s goodness working within, I can better spot what threatens the true life of the spirit: temptations to pride and vanity, floodwaters of fear and anxiety, the poisons of vice and corruption.

The community life provides the strains and tensions of real human relationships, the “wilderness” through which we journey in this life. I don’t need to move to a lonely desert landscape to find the wilderness – its’ right here. I don’t need to isolate myself to face my “demons”, they are within me. What I do need to do is engage this interior landscape and the wilderness provided by the diverse personalities of “many brethren” to learn compassion and mercy, and to bear the weaknesses of body and behavior of my brothers as a loving member of the Body of Christ. That’s what monastic life is meant to be about – it’s what I came to St. Meinrad to do.