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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.
Lectio: John 20:19-31
April 9, 2010
John 20:19-31 (Today’s New International Version)
Jesus Appears to His Disciples
19 On the evening of that first day of the week, when the disciples were together, with the doors locked for fear of the Jewish leaders, Jesus came and stood among them and said, “Peace be with you!” 20 After he said this, he showed them his hands and side. The disciples were overjoyed when they saw the Lord.
21 Again Jesus said, “Peace be with you! As the Father has sent me, I am sending you.” 22 And with that he breathed on them and said, “Receive the Holy Spirit. 23 If you forgive the sins of anyone, their sins are forgiven; if you do not forgive them, they are not forgiven.”Jesus Appears to Thomas
24 Now Thomas (also known as Didymus [a]), one of the Twelve, was not with the disciples when Jesus came. 25 So the other disciples told him, “We have seen the Lord!”
But he said to them, “Unless I see the nail marks in his hands and put my finger where the nails were, and put my hand into his side, I will not believe.”
26 A week later his disciples were in the house again, and Thomas was with them. Though the doors were locked, Jesus came and stood among them and said, “Peace be with you!” 27 Then he said to Thomas, “Put your finger here; see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it into my side. Stop doubting and believe.”28 Thomas said to him, “My Lord and my God!”
29 Then Jesus told him, “Because you have seen me, you have believed; blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.”
The Purpose of John’s Gospel
30 Jesus performed many other signs in the presence of his disciples, which are not recorded in this book. 31 But these are written that you may believe [b] that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name.
Fear, peace and joy
Forgiveness
Locked doors, presence
Belief
These are the words that I find captivating in this passage. In lectio, I know that I’m supposed to settle in one theme, one word or phrase, and let that continue to speak to me. But this passage doesn’t feel that way to me. Jesus’ friends arrive in the scene behind locked doors, desperate for their own safety, rightly terrified that the authorities will implicate and kill them next. The sense of tension and terror in that room are palpable.
Jesus arrives, through locked doors. Immediately, that tension and fear turns to love and joy, and that love and joy is focused on forgiveness; their own forgiveness at first, but then Jesus’ mission to them to go out and forgive.
The scene is repeated for Thomas (more like us and our culture than we usually admit): Prove It To Me! Thomas isn’t just “my atheist friends”; Thomas is me even at my best moments; I want and need to experience God tangibly. Jesus arrives again, through locked doors. Thomas (and I) again believe, and the entire story concludes with a call to belief, in the form of action.
I pray, thinking about the many locked doors in my life, the areas in which I have hurt or been hurt, or just don’t want to go. Those locked doors are no match for the presence of Jesus the Christ. Come, Jesus, appear behind those doors, and bring me joy and peace, that I might once again forgive, receive forgiveness, and believe.
Listening as a Sacred Calling
April 8, 2010
Lectio: Luke 19:28-40
March 26, 2010
Lectio: John 12:1-8
March 21, 2010
John 12:1-8
Six days before the Passover, Jesus arrived at Bethany, where Lazarus lived, whom Jesus had raised from the dead. Here a dinner was given in Jesus’ honor. Martha served, while Lazarus was among those reclining at the table with him. Then Mary took about a pint of pure nard, an expensive perfume; she poured it on Jesus’ feet and wiped his feet with her hair. And the house was filled with the fragrance of the perfume.
But one of his disciples, Judas Iscariot, who was later to betray him, objected, “Why wasn’t this perfume sold and the money given to the poor? It was worth a year’s wages.” He did not say this because he cared about the poor but because he was a thief; as keeper of the money bag, he used to help himself to what was put into it.
“Leave her alone,” Jesus replied. ” It was intended that she should save this perfume for the day of my burial. You will always have the poor among you, but you will not always have me.”
This is a story of gratitude. Jesus enters Bethany where, at Lazarus’ house, a dinner is thrown in his honor after having previously raising Lazarus from the dead. Whatever your favorite and finest meal may be, Martha’s cooking was the finest, the house was no doubt all together and everything just right. Mary also poured out extravagantly to Jesus, her brother was dead but now alive. They didn’t think twice about how much the dinner cost, or how much the oil cost, it was nothing at all in comparison.
This is a story of paradox. Jesus, who’d raised Lazarus from the dead, would soon go to his own death, which Mary anointed him for, wiping his feet with her hair. They poured out love and respect to Jesus this day, in a few days he would be mistreated and abused, even the disciples would run away or deny him.
We have a choice to react like Judas, considering ourselves the first priority in all things. But if we remember the things Christ has done, pouring his love on us like a sweet perfume, how can we react any other way but to desire to reciprocate like Martha and Mary?