Five leadership secrets of the Trappist monk
July 20, 2010
Five leadership secrets of the Trappist monk
Stephen Martin, who explores leadership as a speechwriter and as a business columnist for the Raleigh (N.C.) News & Observer, has written for America, Commonweal and U.S. News & World Report.
Trappist monks live apart from the world. But their rich and ancient traditions also offer vital lessons on leadership for those of us living in it. The Roman Catholic order, founded in Citeaux, France, has practiced prayer nonstop for nearly a thousand years. Responsible for supporting themselves, they have been entrepreneurs for just as long.
As times and market conditions have changed, Trappists have kept up by reinventing their businesses continually. Since the founding of Mepkin Abbey near Charleston, S.C., in 1949, for example, the monks there have sold cinnamon buns, ventured into logging, run a large egg farm and, most recently, started selling native plants. How have Trappists thrived through the centuries? Here are five of their secrets:
1. Get (really) disciplined. As in waking up at 3 a.m. every day for the rest of your life. That’s when Trappists rise for Vigils, their first community prayer of the day. They will gather for worship five more times before turning in at 8 p.m. In between, they work, study and pray some more. Their schedule almost never varies. Their meals rarely change. They talk as little as possible. Everything about their lives is ordered toward their mission of praising God.
On the surface, this routine seems like a soul-killing exercise in boredom. But tremendous focus paves their path to salvation. “The monk has a feel for the stark and the spare,” writes Michael Downey in his book, Trappist. “Fasting, abstinence, and keeping vigil are disciplines embraced so as to stay alert, awake for the coming of God.”
2. Throw away the key . At Holy Cross Abbey in Berryville, Va., where I recently made a weekend retreat, the doors to the guest rooms lock only from the inside. When you go out, there’s no way to secure your laptop or Blackberry or car keys. It’s a rather discomfiting reminder of what makes the Trappist world go round: trust, in God and your brothers. Spiritual growth doesn’t happen when we’re holding back or playing defense. It takes openness.
“Anytime you get put together with 15 or 20 people you don’t know, you’ll find things about them that are objectionable, and they’ll find them about you,” said Daniel DeVoe, the guest master at Holy Cross Abbey who is seriously thinking of becoming a Trappist himself. The trick is learning to appreciate the strengths of others, to give them the benefit of the doubt, to acknowledge your own shortcomings and work to fix them. It’s all about building trust, the ancient glue that, against all odds, holds together monastic organizations to this day.
3. Know your customer. During a retreat several years ago at Mepkin Abbey, I found myself alone in the gift shop with Brother Stephen, an elderly, startlingly fit, lifelong monk. He rang up a few items, swiped my credit card and asked how I was doing. I asked customers the same thing all the time when I clerked at a grocery store in high school. Unlike me, however, he actually cared about the answer.
I confessed, frankly, to being tired with a busy job, grad school, a young son and another child on the way. There wasn’t a lot of time for prayer, which was what I probably needed most. He nodded and remarked that perhaps helping raise my family was a form of prayer in itself. We talked for another 10 minutes. More insights, tailored just for me, followed — and I shouldn’t have been surprised.
As Michael Downey explains, the work of monks “is not to be understood primarily as a product for consumers in a marketplace. …The fruits of the monk’s labor are sold as a means of livelihood, but they are sold to persons, real people with deep needs, not bottom-line consumers.”
4. Shut up. A monk’s life is a study in humility. It’s about setting aside personal plans and ambitions for the good of the community, saying goodbye to worldly pleasures and doing highly repetitive work with few tangible rewards. It’s a daily exercise in probing your flaws and coming to terms with your own insignificance. This adds up to a perpetual assault on pride, and it starts with quieting down and listening to what your brothers have to say.
“We’re all so impressed by what we know,” said DeVoe, the Holy Cross guest master. But rather than overestimating our own abilities, he said, real knowledge comes from paying attention to those around us. Monks have a longstanding tradition of turning to spiritual directors for guidance in the contemplative life. The feedback they get gives them a better sense of their strengths and weaknesses and serves as a spark for change. “You learn things about yourself that you wouldn’t know otherwise,” DeVoe said.
5. Live in the margins. In his book Leaders Make the Future, futurist Bob Johansen notes that “true innovations are likely to come from the margins that are stretched, rather than from the mainstream.”
Trappists make their home in the margins. They labor in obscurity, their chosen path makes little sense to most people, and they’re criticized, sometimes even by fellow Christians, for closeting themselves away when they could be out in the world helping people with urgent problems. They have Web sites and use e-mail judiciously, but they take care not to swamp themselves with information and distraction. They remain, in other words, as counter-cultural as ever, and therein is their strength.
Over the centuries, as Downey writes, monasteries around the world (and not just Trappist ones) have served as “renowned centers of peace and refuge, the focal points of culture and education.” That’s surely because they have stood beside the mainstream and observed it carefully but never immersed themselves in it. Their perspective is always a bit out of step with the times and refreshingly original as a result.
“The logic of worldly success rests on a fallacy: the strange error that our perfection depends on the thoughts and opinions and applause of other men,” Thomas Merton, America’s most renowned Trappist monk, wrote in his landmark autobiography The Seven Storey Mountain.
More than 60 years since its publication, and centuries since their founding, Trappists still go their own way, focused and unhurried, free of the need for the world’s approval. By training, they’re too modest to say their experience with leadership can teach us anything, but we’d be wise to learn all we can from them anyway.
Essential Disciplines for Our Time 3
December 19, 2008
Reflection … an antidote to hurry
Look at how the lilies grow (Matthew 6:28)
If you’re going to enjoy a painting you’ve got to set aside time. You must not expect that you can take a fleeting glance and reach a conclusion, any more than you can just look at a book’s dust cover …. When I’m filming, in between times when they’re setting up for the next work of art, I’ve got to sit somewhere and often I’ve been I’ve been parked in front of something that I would not have looked at twice. But forced to sit and contemplate it, I begin to warm up to it and it opens up to me …. It might never be something that we would choose as our first love, but it can speak to us. It’s that giving time, looking at art peacefully, that matters. Crowded, noisy museums are not conducive to this kind of looking. I forget who it was who said that the necessity for appreciating art is a chair — which I always have, you see, because I go round in a wheelchair. So I really look. (Sister Wendy Becket, nun and art critic, from an interview in Image: A Journal of the Arts and Religion)
Civilization is revving itself into a pathologically short attention span. The trend might be coming from the acceleration of technology, the short-horizon perspective of market-driven economics, the next-election perspective of democracies, or the distractions of personal multi-tasking. All are on the increase. (Stewart Brand, The Clock of the Long Now)
Consider the following statements of Jesus taken from Matthew’s narrative of his life:
Look at how the birds don’t plant or harvest… (Matt. 6:26)
Look at how the lilies grow… (6:28)
The kingdom of heaven is like a farmer who planted seed… (13:24)
The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed (13:31)
The kingdom of heaven is like yeast (13:33)
The kingdom of heaven is like a treasure that someone discovers hidden in a field… (13:44)
The kingdom of heaven is like a pearl merchant on the lookout for choice pearls… (13:45)
The kingdom of heaven is like a fishing net… (13:47)
The kingdom of heaven is like a person who brings both new and old from the storehouse (13:52)
The kingdom of heaven is like the owner of an estate… (20:1)
This generation is like a group of children playing a game in the public square… (Matt. 11:16)
Jesus, like all those around him, saw birds every day. He saw flowers, watched fishermen haul in nets, heard of people winning the lottery, knew of people who owned lots of property. But he had cultivated the practice of doing something that few people then (as now) almost never make room for: he considered the significance of what he experienced as it related to the work of God. Everybody saw birds and flowers, but Jesus saw how they reflected God’s provision. Every household was familiar with yeast and its qualities, but Jesus saw how it reflected the hidden, subversive and viral nature of God’s kingdom.
He regularly took the “brute facts” of his day and mined them for their divine significance. And in each case he paid attention to one feature of what he saw. We like to believe that we can notice many things at once (and we may even take a certain degree of pride in our ability to multi-task), but it’s a frustrating and inefficient way to go through life:
Despite our subjective feelings to the contrary, actually our brain can work on only one thing at a time. Rather than allowing us to efficiently do two things at the same time, multitasking actually results in inefficient shifts in our attention. In short, the brain is designed to work most efficiently when it works on a single task and for sustained rather than intermittent and alternating periods of time…. But despite neuroscientific evidence to the contrary, we are being made to feel that we must multitask in order to keep our head above the rising flood of daily demands. In essence, the brain has certain limits that we must accept. (Richard Restak, M.D., The New Brain)
Think of time as soil, attention as water, and quiet as sun. Allowing ourselves these three, we’ll naturally grow. Like Jesus (and many others who have lived wisely and courageously), we’ll notice what’s in front of us and be able to relate it to God’s work in this world.
But we’ll only notice if we slow way down and shut way up. Rituals like Sabbath-keeping (or creating mini-sabbaths throughout each day) give us that opportunity. So do reading and lingering over Scripture. We let our imagination “image” the scenes and then think about the significance of those scenes. (My friend Larry Bourgeois refers to this and other “slow-downs” as spiritual loitering.) But even staring at a painting, watching kids play, admiring a tree for several minutes or thinking about the food in front of you are invitations to reflect.
Essential Disciplines for Our Time 2
December 17, 2008
Single-Mindedness … an antidote to schizophrenia
Submit yourselves, then, to God. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you. Come near to God and he will come near to you. Wash your hands, you sinners, and purify your hearts, you double-minded. (James 4:1-8, NIV)
Jesus doesn’t’ mince words about what’s required to follow him. It is to “lose our lives.” For those who follow him there’s a clear expectation that we’ll follow his agenda. (Matthew 7:21) And when James blasts out the encouragement: “purify your hearts, you double-minded,” he’s reiterating the kind of attention and focus that undergird the Christian life. A “double-minded” person suffers from a type of schizophrenia, a rupture of the person. There’s a bi-polar quality to life, exhibitied by conflicting allegiances and multiple masters.
As Christians, however, we’re to turn our hearts fully toward God’s will in order to become single-minded. This is what’s meant by the call to “purify” ourselves. This may be the single most important base for discipleship. Jesus asks, “Are you in or out? Coming with me or staying behind. Make your choice and be aware of what the choice entails.”
Modern life, however, does anything but encourage single-mindedness. The multiplicity of distractions available to us in our time is nothing short of astonishing. If we are going to follow Jesus faithfully in this whacked out modern life, we have to find a way not just to turn down the volume, rise above all the nonsense and keep our eyes fixed on Christ.
There are two spiritual disciplines that seem especially appropriate for our day. They inoculate us against distraction and hurry. They’ve always been useful and a part of the lives of mature Christians, but because of the ethos of our culture, maybe we need to give them more attention than usual. The first of these is recollection., the subject of this post. The second, the subject of tomorrow’s post — if tomorrow should come — is reflection.
Recollection … an antidote to distraction
Be still and know that I am God. (Psalm 46:10)
I wonder what Aldous Huxley would say if he were alive now in the 21st century. It seems almost quaint when he talks about the radio — this was written over 60 years ago — but if you understand it as “aural bombardment” in general, then there’s a takeaway for us:
The twentieth century is, among other things, that Age of Noise. Physical noise, mental noise and noise of desire — we hold history’s record for all of them. And no wonder; for all the resources of our almost miraculous technology have been thrown into the current assault against silence. That most popular and influential of all recent inventions, the radio [what would he say today!] is nothing but a conduit through which pre-fabricated din can flow…. And this din goes far deeper, of course, than the eardrums. It penetrates the mind, filling it with a babel of distractions — news items, mutually irrelevant bits of information, blasts of corybantic or sentimental music, continually repeated doses of drama that bring no catharsis, but merely create a craving for daily or even hourly emotional enemas. And where…the broadcasting stations support themselves by selling time to advertisers, the noise is carried from the ears…to the ego’s central core of wish and desire…. All advertising has but one purpose — to prevent the will from ever achieving silence…. The condition of an expanding and technologically progressive system of mass production is universal craving. Advertising is the organized effort to extend and intensify craving. (Aldous Huxley)
The Practice of Jesus
Read Mark 1:35, Mark 6:31 and Matthew 14:10-13 and it will become clear that Jesus took time for recollection, which literally means “collecting again” or “bringing to mind again.” Think of the imagery behind the word recollection. You have the picture of someone picking up pieces that have become scattered and putting them all in one place. This is what we do in recollection. We take the scattered elements of our selves and our days and put them back into a whole piece. We remind ourselves that we belong to the Lord, that he loves us, that one thing matters, that we’re here to receive and dole out love.
Recollection is the precursor for reflection. We first have to gather the scattered elements of our selves and life before we can think about them. It’s like doing archeology. You’re digging around and come across a bunch of pottery shards embedded in dirt. You carefully extricate them, clean them, and put them together on a table. Then you carefully examine them and figure out what goes together. Eventually you might get a pot. But there’s no examination until there’s some sort of collection. Re-collection starts when we stop. Re-collection sets the stage for reflection, but the two dance together. If we practice recollection at regular intervals through the day, we train ourselves to return to God. Those stopovers on our daily journey might revolve around fixed-hour prayer. They might involve two or three scheduled breaks in our day just to sit still, be quiet, and pray silently. Journaling might also help us. What you do specifically is almost inconsequential in comparison to simply doing something. The truly important thing is to act courageously and wisely by carving out moments to step off the path, silence the noise and listen for a moment with God to your life.
Essential Disciplines for Our Time 1
December 16, 2008
Purity of heart is to will one thing. (Søren Kierkegaard)
[Your heavenly Father] will give you all you need from day to day if you live for him and make the Kingdom of God your primary concern. (Matthew 6:33, NLT)
… a doubtful mind is as unsettled as a wave of the sea that is driven and tossed by the wind. People like that should not expect to receive anything from the Lord. They can’t make up their minds. They waver back and forth in everything they do. (James 1:6-8, NLT)
Don’t make room for the world, for your unbridled passions, or your laziness. Words aren’t enough to claim the kingdom of God. It takes strength and courage and violence. You must violently resist the tides of the world. Violently give up all that holds you back from God. Violently turn your will over to God to do his will alone. (François Fenelon)
Single-mindedness, recollection, silence and reflection are foundational for developing a mature, durable spiritual life. There is, in fact, no mature conversation with God and no deep understanding of his created order that occurs without them. They form the backdrop, context and the ground for our discipleship. In their absence we can only expect an abstract babbling about God, a kind of virtual experience of the divine based on the acquisition of religious information rather than direct experience of the Holy One. Without them we have the semblance of power, but certainly not the real deal. In short, we can’t afford to lose them.
But in fact we are losing them. Of course there has never been a crowd stampeding to God or rushing headlong to the practices that help us draw close to him. The majority has always been content to travel effortlessly along a broad and comfortable highway leading to an equally broad gate. Jesus was quick to point this out. (Matt. 7:13) But there will always be holdouts, people who want the less traveled and bumpier road despite the difficulties involved. We, like our ancestors, can still find that narrow road today. But whereas in the past the effort to find and walk it well took all our efforts, today it seems to take more than all. We look in our travel bag for the items of single-mindedness, recollection, silence and reflection only to find that the supply is low, that someone raided it in the middle of the night and left us in short supply. Welcome to modern life.
Spring Cleaning: The Deeper Retreat
April 20, 2008
Retreats are to the spiritual life what spring cleaning is to a house. They give us the chance to go deep. They help us see what’s cluttering up the joint. In retreats we find better footing and often gain excellent perspective on what seem to be intractable problems. But precisely because they’re like spring cleaning, they can’t be what we survive on. If you only cleaned your apartment or house once every few months, the in-between time would get, well, interesting. (My sophomore year of college I lived in a house with six other guys, and about half of them liked the once-a-semester approach to cleaning.) So small daily chores like wiping down counters and washing the dishes, and weekly rituals where you go a little deeper are needed. When I’m with others for the purpose of offering spiritual direction, I’m always probing to discover whether there are daily and weekly rituals of quiet conversation with God. Without them the more extended retreat of 3-5 days, though still useful, can’t meet the expectations imposed on it. There’s simply not enough time to really dial down and address the cluttered aspects of your life. So by all means clean your “house,” but tend to the daily and weekly needs as well.
Alone and Still
April 19, 2008
“Anyone who intends to live the inner and spiritual life has to get away, with Jesus, from the crowd.”
Thomas à Kempis, The Imitation of Christ, 1.20
There’s a famous line by Blaise Pascal that, loosely translated, goes like this: “All the troubles we experience can be traced to one thing: not knowing how to sit peacefully in a room.”
Monasticism has, for most of its history, recognized the truth of this statement and seen the “cell” (the small room a monk or nun inhabits) as a crucial element of spiritual formation. I’m reminded here of another quotation from Thomas à Kempis: “You’ll grow to love your cell if you learn to stay in it; if you don’t it will only be a drag.” [my translation] Of course a cell doesn’t have to be in a convent or monastery. Any dedicated space will do. The point is to have “a place apart,” to get comfortable being in that place (without the aid of flickering images and sound directly in front of you), and to quiet oneself internally.
I’ve heard lots of messages on Psalm 46.10 (“Be still and know that I am God”), but I don’t know of any instances where the practice of being alone and the skill of quieting oneself internally are presented and taught as part of the basic grammar of discipleship to Jesus. Yes, churches here and there offer seminars and classes that introduce people to more contemplative practices, but these are presented as good ideas to be considered rather than essentials to be mastered.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer made the sound observation that community is loaded with danger for people who aren’t comfortable being alone (and conversely, that solitude is toxic for people unanchored from community). His point is that learning to be alone teaches us how to be with others. The practice of solitude, then, brings health to the community. In the subtraction of people and words, there’s finally room for addition. We can understand at deeper levels that God is present, that God is sovereign, that God is good.
Not once have I ever come back from a period away for solitude, silence and prayer feeling less capable of being with others. In every instance I’ve returned more aware of who God is, who I am in God, and what my place is among his people and creation. As odd as this may sound, I come back realizing that in the final analysis I don’t need them in order to know who I am or whose I am. If I don’t need them then I’m free to love them. But if I need them I’m likely to manipulate them.
Going Away: The Value of Retreats (3)
January 31, 2008
A short 5-minute video on the importance getting away and dialing down so you can come back strong.
Going Away: The Value of Retreats (2)
January 30, 2008
A 5-minute video on the importance of getting away and dialing down so you can come back strong.
Going Away: The Value of Retreats (1)
January 29, 2008
A 5-minute video on the importance of getting away and dialing down so you can come back strong.