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No 165 - 2002
2.The Role of the Monastery in Today's Secular Society:
A Layman's View
by Sir David Goodall
The text of a talk given to the monastic community at Douai Abbey on 28 January 2003.
A MONASTIC life has its own intrinsic value. Self-evidently, this can only be experienced or fully understood from the inside: by those who have answered the call to seek God within the disciplined framework of the Rule. But it is experienced also, albeit in a different way, by all who come into contact with it from without. It has its impact on everyone it touches. It is of the impact of the monastic life on people living in our contemporary secular environment that I want to speak this evening.
The perspective from which one views the contemporary environment is of course conditioned by one's own background and experience. The elderly - and perhaps especially the privileged elderly - tend towards pessimism; and the elements which I am about to identify are not necessarily those which would be most apparent to someone in his or her twenties, to someone in the media or in the City, or indeed to someone on unemployment benefit; nor would they necessarily see them in the same light.
So let me first of all declare my own credentials or lack of them. I have never been a monk, or lived in a monastery, or tried my vocation in one. But I was educated by monks at Ampleforth and my wife and I now live close to the Abbey there. We have old and good friends among the monks, and my acquaintance with the monastic life comes primarily from them. I owe a particular debt to my old Housemaster and wise counsellor, the late Father Columba Cary-Elwes; and also to the late Cardinal Hume, whose collection of conferences given to his community when he was Abbot, Searching for God, seems to me to be a distillation of English Benedictine wisdom.
I grew up before Vatican II and so experienced the full force of that operation, carried out, as Fr Gabriel Daly once said, without an anaesthetic on a patient who thought he was in perfectly good health. After what is now regarded as a privileged education, I served briefly in the army, and then spent thirty five years of my life as a diplomat, one of those of whom Macaulay remarked that "they have always been more distinguished by their address, by the art by which they win the confidence of those with whom they have to deal than by generous enthusiasm or austere rectitude." You have been warned.
So what is it about contemporary British society which leads us to describe it as "secular"?
In the first place, it is an unbelieving society. Not necessarily a positively disbelieving one, although professed atheism may be on the increase; but a society which has lost its sense of the reality or relevance of the supernatural, of what can be neither seen, nor measured nor costed. At the same time, there is a prevailing climate of scepticism; scepticism not just about religious belief, but about almost everything: about institutions, personalities, commitment, other people's honesty; indeed about truth itself, and whether it is to be found anywhere. And it is a society profoundly averse from absolutes.
Partly this is a consequence of the Enlightenment; of the successes of science in exploring how the universe and everything in it works; of the triumph of the scientific method, in which there are no absolutes, but only hypotheses which are treated as provisionally true until they can be shown to be false.
Then there is the legacy of Freud: the popularisation of theories of psycho-analysis, which has created the impression that all human motivation, whether in relation to conduct or beliefs, is explicable in terms of causes (generally ignoble ones) other than those of which we think we are aware.
More recently, "post-modernism" has introduced us to "deconstructionism" - the contention that no statement can ever be what it seems, and that its "truth" is simply a reflection of the agenda of the person making it. It may be impossible to define "post-modernism", and indeed some of us may barely have heard of it, but we are all affected by it.
Our increased awareness of the almost inconceivable vastness of the universe, both in space and time, has diminished our sense of the significance of man and made it harder to hold on to the notion of a "personal" God. The communications revolution, which has brought the views and beliefs of people from every culture into one's own sitting-room, the increasing ease of travel and the arrival of the multicultural society have all helped to erode the previously perceived uniqueness of our own culture and faith.
Instead we have "pluralism": not just an awareness that we have much to learn from one another, but a perception that tolerance is a necessary condition of different races, cultures and faiths being able to coexist peacefully in our "global village". And from tolerance it is easy to move to indifference: the position that different ways of looking at the world have equal value or equal lack of value.
Meanwhile the relative affluence of our society the sheer range of what is available - has led us to equate freedom with maximisation of choice without, as Clifford Longley has pointed out in a recent edition of The Tablet, any reference to the basis on which such choices are to be made.
A critically important factor in the current climate of unbelief is, of course, the power of the media, all the greater now because the electronic media in particular bring contemporary culture so vividly into the heart of every home.
A few years ago, Avery Dulles identified six areas where the Church and the media conflict: 'The Church's message is a mystery of faith, whereas the press is investigative and iconoclastic; the message of the Church is eternal and seeks to maintain continuity, whereas the press lives off novelty; the Church tries to promote unity, whereas the press specialises in conflict; the main work of the Church is spiritual, whereas the press concentrates on more tangible phenomena and selectively reports Church teaching as though the Pope were chiefly interested in sex, politics and power; in a democratic society, the press has great difficulty appreciating a hierarchical structure, and has an in-built bias in favour of the disobedient priest and the dissident theologian; Church teaching is often complex and subtle, whereas the media want stories that are simple and striking.
Although the media offer much that is of interest and value, the overall tone is relentlessly critical and irreverent, and in its attitude to institutions often recklessly destructive. As Macaulay (to quote him again) said of Voltaire, "he could not build: he could only pull down: he was the very Vitruvius of ruin".
At the same time the press promotes a negative ideology of its own in which absolute standards of right and wrong especially if derived from scripture or tradition tend to be presented as "fundamentalist" constraints on human rights (although current attitudes to paedophilia and "racism" as radically unforgivable crimes seem to be bringing absolutes in again, so to speak, by the back door).
The combined effect of all these strands in our cultural environment is to relegate religious belief to the realm of private idiosyncrasy, a degree or two more intellectually respectable than astrology, to be tolerated as a matter of personal choice so long as it makes no claim to propound truths of general application or to impose obligations for example in relation to sexual conduct or abortion - which appear to run counter to the Zeitgeist.
Christianity, in short, has become counter-cultural; and Christians are now what the sociologists call a cognitive or deviant minority: in other words a group whose core beliefs and assumptions are radically different from those of the majority of people among whom they live.
Many of us, I think, have not yet fully recognised how far this process of what might be called the alienation of Christian believers from the society in which they live has gone, or of its consequences for individual Christians. In the words of the Anglican writer Olive Wyon, the current atmosphere of unbelief "seeps into everything [so that] we are rather like people living in a street where gas is leaking and people are overcome by the fumes before they know the danger is there".
I was reminded of this when I read in the same recent number of The Tablet of the head of a Catholic comprehensive school who teaches children about sex and personal relationships "in a Catholic context" but who "believes that the school should not seek to indoctrinate the pupils if they are to grow up healthily". The distinction between teaching doctrine and "indoctrination" is not a simple one, and perhaps one sees what the headmaster means; but it is hard not to discern a whiff of the gas leak in his approach.
Unbelief however is not simply a half-hidden infection. As the American sociologist Peter Berger pointed out in his well-known book A Rumour of Angels, beliefs whether true or false need to be shared in order to be plausible. Beliefs which are in opposition to those of the great majority of one's contemporaries inevitably lose plausibility. They do not of course cease to be true, but because they seem outlandish they cease to be plausible even to the believer - and hence come to be seen as either irrelevant or simply false.
Berger gives the example of someone who found himself suddenly transposed into a society where everyone, including "opinion-formers" and scientists, took it as axiomatic that the earth was flat. Although he thought he knew that the earth was really round, he would before long begin to think it must be flat. This is beginning to be the situation of the individual Christian believer in our post-modern society.
It must be more than half a century since Karl Rahner discerned the shift from a Church "sustained by a homogeneously Christian society to a Church made up of those who have struggled against their environment in order to reach a personally, clearly and explicitly responsible decision of faith".
In order to succeed in that struggle, it is evident that prayer, the Eucharist, the sacraments and serious reading all those activities which help us to stay close to the hidden God - are more important than ever. But it has to be recognised that the intense pressures of modern life in our society make it extremely difficult I would suggest even more difficult than it has been in the past for the laity to make room, either for lectio divina or for reflective prayer.
Think, for example, of families where (as is increasingly the norm) both spouses are in full time employment while bringing up children; commuting long distances; facing heavy professional demands in highly competitive careers careers in which success is measured in terms of financial and other material rewards, and job security is steadily diminishing. Their working environment is one in which God is never mentioned or thought of; while at home television, radio, cinema, theatres and now the internet offer a bewildering range of entertainment and distraction in such spare moments as can be found.
It is not only prayer or spiritual reading which are difficult to reconcile with this modern lifestyle. Relationships suffer too. Take this passage from a perceptive essay on Anthony Trollope, written as long ago as 1949: "Life has become more restricted, paradoxically enough [since Trollope wrote], long office hours and long train journeys, on the one hand, and supplied amusements, on the other, have eaten into the time which was once laid out in the play of relationships. There is less time for slow growth, for the silent maturing of feeling. The incidents of love, travel, changes of residence or work pass frequently and rapidly across our lives and the reaction is shallow. Often enough we live on borrowed feelings having had no time or thought to nourish our own. Consequently, the individual who is articulate [one thinks of television and newspaper commentators] gets an inflated value, and literature and living is often distended by the wind of exhibitionism"1. What was already true in 1949 is doubly true in 2003. Berger argues that, in order to sustain their beliefs in a hostile environment, believers need "plausibility structures" that is to say groups of like-minded people whom you respect and who, by sharing your beliefs, validate them and render them plausible. But here too the contemporary Christian believer is relatively isolated.
Most of the groups to which lay people belong colleagues at work, clubs and societies are purely secular. Parishes particularly city parishes are often communities only in name. The "Ghetto Catholicism" of the past, which was a "plausibility structure" of a kind, has gone, and we now put a premium on openness, not always appreciating that openness especially when it means being totally open to an unbelieving world is not by itself a recipe for conserving or deepening supernatural faith.
Moreover the Church itself has, since Vatican II, been riven by internal controversy. Ironically, as inter-denominational divisions have narrowed and softened, deep divisions have opened up within the Catholic Church itself between conservatives and progressives of various shades, and between what (to oversimplify) may be called "horizontalists" and "verticalists".
As a result, encounters with fellow believers (who may themselves be deeply influenced by the cultural environment I have described, as well as being divided from one another by controversy) do not always provide the support which should come from a shared world-view. One has only to read the Catholic press to see how far we are from being able to say "See how these Christians love one another".
The picture I have painted of the contemporary cultural landscape may strike you as unduly dark. I am well aware that it is both incomplete and oversimplified, and that there is much in our present situation which gives ground for hope as well as dismay. I am certainly not advocating a return to pre-Vatican II Catholicism which the late Bishop Butler OSB memorably called "the best of all possible religions, and everything in it an intellectual scandal."
But there is no escaping the fact that we now live in a materialistic and largely unbelieving society, scarred by irreverence and cynicism, in which the lot of the Christian lay person can be a dangerously lonely one, struggling to hold on to a world-view regarded by most of his or her contemporaries as being at best irrelevant and at worst illusory: a society where faith, in the words of the late Austin Farrer, is often seen simply as the "art of talking oneself out of anxiety by the entertainment of unreal supposition".2 Which brings me at last to the role of the monastery and its importance for the Church.
At this point, I should say that most of what I think about what a monastery is and what it should be is to be found in an essay by Fr Columba Cary-Elwes in the Spring 1981 Supplement to The Way, called Letter and Spirit: St Benedict's Rule for our Times. Fr Columba wrote with gentleness and authority, and of course out of his own personal experience, none of which I could begin to match. But I would be failing in my remit if I simply referred you to him; so I will content myself with quoting him from time to time by way of illustration.
In the first place, a monastery is a community of faith: and in an unbelieving world, that is the strongest "plausibility structure" there can be. A community of intelligent, thinking people for whom the faith is central to their lives, who share and practice it together, and who demonstrate its reality by following a rule of life which makes sense only if that faith is true.
Then a monastery is or should be a place of unity. Of course there will be deep differences of opinion and personality clashes within a monastic community; as Fr Columba observed "For those of us who live with other people, human relationships should provide enough asceticism for all but the most zealous for physical suffering". A community of monks or nuns may well contain its quota of conservatives, progressives, reactionaries, charismatics and liberation theologians. But there is nevertheless a unity which transcends controversy a unity, I suppose, which comes from the shared search for God and the shared observance of the Rule which is edifying and strengthening for those encountering it from outside, from an environment characterised by controversy and criticism.
Along with this sense of unity, and linked to it, go other qualities notably lacking in today's secular society. In a world from which respect has almost vanished, there is respect respect for the Abbot, and respect for one another; in a world disparaging of institutions, there is loyalty loyalty to the monastery and to the Church; in a world chary of commitment and neglectful of fidelity, there is fidelity to one's vocation, and perseverance in it; and in a world avid for success and recognition, which puts a premium on self-fulfilment, there is an absence of self-seeking and an indifference to worldly success.
(I would like to add that there is also a simplicity of life, in sharp contrast to a world up to the eyeballs in new gadgets and state of the art technology; but I am afraid that this is one area in which monasteries too have found the allurements of contemporary living too strong to resist.)
Above all, of course, a monastery is a place of prayer, both communal and private: where the visitor can experience the liturgy performed with a reverence and thoughtfulness often lacking outside; a place of peace, where room is made for those very things prayer, spiritual reading, opportunities just to think and to take stock - which are so easily squeezed out of life in the market place; and a place where those in trouble can hopefully find spiritual counsel and spiritual healing.
And it is a place where order prevails the order which follows from the regular performance of the Opus Dei, and from the spirit of obedience, and which has almost vanished from the world outside. I remember asking a prominent socialist, non-Catholic politician in Hamburg why he was sending his children to a Catholic school. "Wo die Welt noch in Ordnung ist" ("Where the world is still in order") was his reply.
In short, in its relationship with the laity a good monastic community is at every point a kind of corporate antidote to the pressures which characterise life in the secular society: unbelief, division, disloyalty, superficiality, irreverence and cynicism. And on these grounds alone, the monastic life has an importance for the Church today which is at least as great as at any time in the past.
I do not want, nor am I at all qualified, to enter into the controversial question of what are, and what are not, suitable works for a monastic community to undertake. But none of the aspects of monastic life which I have identified can have an impact on the laity unless the monastery and members of its community are in some degree accessible to them.
It follows and I hope you will not think I am abusing my position as a guest in saying so that hospitality in its widest sense must be an important feature of a monastery's life, and that the quality of that hospitality is central to the way in which the laity can relate to it.
I do not need to remind you that this is reflected in chapter 53 of the Rule, with all that St Benedict has to say about receiving each guest as though he were Christ himself. The passage in that chapter which particularly caught my eye when I was preparing this talk is verse 15: "It is most especially in the reception of the poor and of pilgrims that attentive care is to be shown, because in them Christ is all the more received." And St Benedict adds dryly: "Dread is enough of itself to secure honour for the rich".
Today every one coming to a monastery for spiritual refreshment from the secular world outside, whether rich or poor, has in effect the character of a pilgrim. How he or she is received is crucial to the way in which the monastery carries out its main pastoral role the role defined by Cardinal Basil Hume in the words of St Thomas: contemplata aliis tradere: to hand on to others things which have been contemplated.
Interpreting the provisions of the Rule relating to the reception and treatment of guests in the light of modern conditions is not easy. Guests now come in numbers, and with a frequency, never envisaged when the Rule was written. Running retreat centres has become something of a monastic industry and often represents a modern monastery's main source of income. Clearly, monastic hospitality can no longer be offered to everyone simply on the basis of uncovenanted generosity. Nor (as indeed the Rule makes clear) can guests be allowed to distort or disrupt the life of the community.
Fr Columba in his essay speaks of St Benedict himself, and all monks and nuns since, being caught in "the tension between the two Christs: the Christ of prayer and the Christ who is the pilgrim at the door of their lives". How you resolve that tension, or manage to live with it, is a matter for you, and it is not for a layman and one who is a guest! to be prescriptive about it. But since it touches so directly on my theme, perhaps you will allow me one or two tentative generalisations.
Although it is no longer possible for most monasteries to welcome all guests without payment any more than it would be appropriate to receive them "with the whole body stretched out on the ground" monastic hospitality must still be offered in the spirit of the Rule, which (as I read it) is a spirit of generosity and of personal contact between guests and those members of the community assigned by the Abbot to looking after them.
Delegating the management of hospitality to outside employees may make for greater efficiency, but carries with it a risk of diminishing the visitor's sense of experiencing a hospitality which is genuinely monastic. And although a monastery clearly has to be run in a businesslike way, it cannot be run simply as a business without losing something of its essential character.
So as well as being able to participate in the liturgy and the office, guests should have opportunities to meet and get to know one or two members of the community in a relaxed social setting and, if they wish, be put in touch with a confessor or spiritual adviser. Although it will obviously be necessary to set a tariff for accommodation and food, there should be sufficient flexibility to allow of exceptions, and for the exercise of generosity, in cases of need; and hopefully the welcome will always be one of friendship and kindness, and not simply that of a well-run hotel or bed and breakfast.
Indeed kindness (which is no more than the expression of Christian love), and its sister quality of gentleness, should surely be the hallmarks of every monastic community, both internally and in its relations with the outside world.
Perhaps I have now said enough, not just to give you some idea of how this particular layman sees the role of the monastery in our secular society, but also to explain why I believe that role to be so important.
I cannot summarise what I mean better than by quoting Fr Columba's definition, that a monastery is "a place of intercession, a place of community, a showing of the meaning of the Church to the world". To put it in other words, a good monastic community is a living, ostensive proof of the truth of the beliefs on which its life is based and of the values it exemplifies.
Let me leave you with this final thought: that although the modern world is in so many ways almost unimaginably different from the world St Benedict knew, in other respects there are strong similarities, which have brought the role of the Benedictine monastery full circle back to what it was in St Benedict's day: to offer us a true model of the Christian life in a chaotic and largely unbelieving world.
1 Beatrice Curtis Brown: Anthony Trollope, Arthur Barker Ltd, 2nd Edn 1969, p.49
2 Austin Farrer, Faith and Logic, p.9
Index
Editorial
100 Years at Woolhampton as seen from the pages of The Douai Magazine
The New Monastery Buildings by Oliver Holt OSB
A Low God is No God Reflections on latent atheism by Peter Bowe OSB
Go to index of Douai Newsletter.