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.

Posted by Steven | Filed Under disciplines matter, silence matters, sleep matters, solitude matters | Leave a Comment

the aggravation of a profound isolation

January 6, 2010

the soul environs itself with friends, that it may enter into a grander self-acquaintance or solitude; and it goes alone, for a season, that it may exalt its conversation or society. - ralph waldo emerson

I have been contemplating this quote from Emerson, and I think our culture increasingly misses out on the interplay between friendship and solitude. It’s rare that we choose to enter seasons of solitude, yet rarer still having that experience of solitude enrich our conversations and relationships. Our “environ”-ing ourselves in non-obligatory affinity groups has become a wasteland of isolation in shallow community. In this wasteland of isolation, our actual experience of both friendship and solitude is ever-atrophied, even as the desire continues to grow for both of them. We have become lost in our own space - our profound isolation among society aggravated by our desire to be known and to know ourselves. In pursuing to meet our increasing desires for knownness, we have become our own cause célèbre, as our growing pang for real intimacy is merely being aggravated by following someone on Twitter or Facebook: “Steven is sitting with his mug of dark roast contemplating the life of birds in his backyard“…no he’s not, that dark roast is sitting there getting cold as he pauses to type and the contemplation of the life in nature becomes secondary and shallow because he interrupts the moment to tweet about some now non-existent state of being and moment in time that has been interrupted by his own need or felt responsibility for the celebrity of having others know what he’s up to this morning before he even experiences it or digests its significance. In this, I trade depth and significance for a shallow celebrity. And the irony is that in that moment my connection with God or nature or people fades or stops as I set aside the dark roast and contemplating the life of birds to log-in and type it out. Rather than actually experiencing something that can eventually be shared and rather than being present to someone in sharing it, I short-change my experiences and substitute real presence for a distributive and insipid presence that more and more just leaves me exhausted in isolation. This kind of profound isolation eats at many of us, and gets ever-aggravated as we go looking for knownness and intimacy in all the wrong places.

We want to be known, and yet nowadays we impoverish ourselves in a faux knownness - in a virtual connectivity - yet fewer and fewer people actually know us and the experience of presence recedes. Chaundra and I met an old friend at a pub last year, and over a few pints and a lingering meal got re-connected. At one point, I excused myself from the bar to go to the restroom, which was all the way in the back of the place, past the dining room. As I was making my way through the dining room, there was a couple all dressed up and obviously out on a date, and as I passed their table twice I noticed they both had their noses in their iPhones, and at least one of them was on Facebook, probably typing a note about being with the one they love and having a delightful dinner. Except it was only partially true, because they weren’t with the one they loved except in terms of shared spatial coordinates on a map, because they were both lost in their own separate virtual worlds. Admittedly, in arranging to meet our friend for a nice dinner, we set up the experience via Facebook, but we did eventually leave Facebook behind to actually experience relationship.

See, it’s not that the Internet hasn’t been a great tool for social networking and making connections or renewing old acquaintances, it’s that we have substituted actual connections for virtual ones, and also prioritized the virtual ones. Who hasn’t been interrupted in a conversation with a friend by their cell phone as they take a non-urgent call or they tune out from being present to check their Blackberry to see how many e-mails are piling up. We accentuate the virtual at the expense of the real. Oh, sure, people may read my tweets and smile wryly at some comment I make in a virtual community, but they don’t really know me and we are not present to one another. The person they know is mediated by internet access and the virtual masks I construct therein. People imagine that they know me, and I imagine being known, but neither is actually happening to any depth that feeds our souls and sets us on a journey greater than our random comments to no-one-in-particular. We’ve traded an intimacy rich with depth for something shallow and hallow. It’s like my 4 year-old trading her well-worn $10 bill for a shiny new nickel…it’s shiny, but not worth half as a much! Intimacy with others is actually enhanced by the discipline of solitude in our lives, and yet we don’t really believe that to be true or more people would practice it. In fact, as William Deresiwicz insightfully laments, our culture entrains us to never be alone…never disconnect:

“I grew up in the 60s and 70s, the age of television. I was trained to be bored; boredom was cultivated within me like a precious crop. (It has been said that consumer society wants to condition us to feel bored, since boredom creates a market for stimulation.) It took me years to discover — and my nervous system will never fully adjust to this idea; I still have to fight against boredom, am permanently damaged in this respect — that having nothing to do doesn’t have to be a bad thing. The alternative to boredom is what Whitman called idleness: a passive receptivity to the world. So it is with the current generation’s experience of being alone. That is precisely the recognition implicit in the idea of solitude, which is to loneliness what idleness is to boredom. Loneliness is not the absence of company, it is grief over that absence. The lost sheep is lonely; the shepherd is not lonely. But the Internet is as powerful a machine for the production of loneliness as television is for the manufacture of boredom. If six hours of television a day creates the aptitude for boredom, the inability to sit still, a hundred text messages a day creates the aptitude for loneliness, the inability to be by yourself.”

In a culture of constant virtual connectivity, solitude becomes a discipline to be embraced. In a world where friendship has become a comfortable illusion of a virtually-constructed self that merely acquiesces to the Facebook request to be a friend, the challenge of sacred friendship must be met to spur us onward, upward and inward. It’s time for the cultivation of the precious crop of Christlikeness, which embraces both sacred friendship and solitude. But we may ask: OK, but what might this depth look like, how do we do it? The Apostle Paul says it this way: “If you’ve gotten anything at all out of following Christ, if his love has made any difference in your life, if being in a community of the Spirit means anything to you, if you have a heart, if you care— then do me a favor: Agree with each other, love each other, be deep-spirited friends.” (from Philippians 2 – The Message) I’ll end today with David Benner, who points us toward the essence of sacred friendship in a practical way when he writes in his book Sacred Companions, “Spiritual friends share with each other at the level of the soul. This does not mean that they talk about only serious, personal or spiritual matters…Friends who enjoy soul intimacy never settle for gossip or simple information exchange, [they can be comfortable in silence.] Instead they use the data of events as springboards for the sharing of feelings, perceptions, values, ideas and opinions. The conversations of such friends are never merely about what happened in their lives or the world but move from this to how they experience, react to and understand what happened. Dialogue continually moves from the surface to the depths, from the external to the internal. This is the crucial distinctive of dialogue in spiritual friendships.”

Posted by Steven | Filed Under community matters, disciplines matter, solitude matters | Leave a Comment

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.

Posted by Dave | Filed Under ritual matters, silence matters, solitude matters | 2 Comments

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.

Posted by Dave | Filed Under silence matters, solitude matters | 2 Comments