Sermon Tone Analysis

*Archbishop Williams on "God's Workshop" *

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/The following is the address of Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury, to the audience attending Trinity Institute's 2003 conference on Benedictine spirituality.

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Benedict is, as usual, uncompromisingly prosaic in describing the monastic community as a workshop; it’s a place in which we use specific tools – listed with blunt simplicity in chapter 4 of the Rule – which are lent to us by Christ, to be returned on the Last Day, when we receive our wages.

It’s an imagery that conjures up a landscape in monochrome, a grey sky, a stone wall: the tools worn smooth with long use and skilfully patched up over time, taken from the shelf each morning until finally hung up when weariness and age arrive.

The holy life is one in which we learn to handle things, in businesslike and unselfconscious ways, to ‘handle’ the control of the tongue, the habit of not passing on blame, getting up in the morning and not gossiping.

A monastic lifetime is one in which these habits are fitted to our hands.

Simone Weil wrote somewhere about how the tool is for the seasoned worker the extension of the hand, not something alien.

Benedict’s metaphors prompt us to think of a holiness that is like that, an ‘extension’ of our bodies and our words that we’ve come not to notice.

In a recent essay on Benedictine Holiness, Professor Henry Mayr-Harting describes it as ‘completely undemonstrative, deeply conventual, and lacking any system of expertise’ (Holiness, Past and Present, ed.

Stephen Barton, London~/New York 2003, p.261).

Very broadly, that is the picture I want to develop with reference to this early and potent image of the workshop and its tools – though I might, while fully understanding the point about expertise, want to think about what sorts of communicable wisdom it also embodies.

At this stage, though, perhaps the most important thing to emphasise is the ‘deeply conventual’: the holiness envisaged by the Rule is entirely inseparable from the common life.

The tools of the work are bound up with the proximity of other people – and the same other people.

As Benedict says the end of chapter 4, the workshop is itself the stability of the community.

Or, to pick up our earlier language, it is the unavoidable nearness of these others that becomes an extension of ourselves.

One of the things we have to grow into unselfconsciousness about is the steady environment of others.

To put it a bit differently, the promise to live in stability is the most drastic way imaginable of recognising the otherness of others – just as in marriage.

If the other person is there, ultimately, on sufferance or on condition, if there is a time-expiry dimension to our relations with particular others, we put a limit on the amount of otherness we can manage.

Beyond a certain point, we reserve the right to say that our terms must prevail after all.

Stability or marital fidelity or any seriously covenanted relation to person or community resigns that long-stop possibility; which is why it feels so dangerous.

At the very start, then, of thinking about Benedictine holiness, there stands a principle well worth applying to other settings, other relationships – not least the Church itself.

How often do we think about the holiness of the Church as bound up with a habitual acceptance of the otherness of others who have made the same commitment?

And what does it feel like to imagine holiness as an unselfconscious getting used to others?

The presence of the other as a tool worn smooth and grey in the hand?

The prosaic settledness of some marriages, the ease of an old priest celebrating the eucharist, the musician’s relation to a familiar instrument playing a familiar piece – these belong to the same family of experience as the kind of sanctity that Benedict evokes here; undemonstrative, as Mayr-Harting says, because there is nothing to prove.

The ‘tools of good works’ listed include the Golden Rule, several of the Ten Commnadments and the corporal works of mercy (clothing the naked, visiting the sick, burying the dead, and so on); but the bulk of them have to do with virtues that can be seen as necessary for the maintenance of stability as a context for growth in holiness.

It is as though Benedict were asking, ‘What does it take to develop people who can live stably together?’

He does not begin by commending stability, but by mapping out an environment where the long-term sameness of my company will not breed bitterness, cynicism and fear of openness with one another.

If you have to spend a lifetime with the same people, it is easy to create a carapace of habitual response which belongs at the surface level, a set of standard reactions which do not leave you vulnerable.

It is the exact opposite of the habitual acceptance of otherness which we were speaking about a little while back, though it can sometimes dangerously resemble it.

With a slightly artificial tidiness, we might see the practices Benedict commends for nurturing the stability of the workshop under three heads.

The monk must be transparent; the monk must be a peacemaker; the monk must be accountable.

Let’s look at these in turn.

Transparency: those who belong to a community such as Benedict describes are required ‘not to entertain deceit in their heart’ (24 in the list of ‘tools’), and, intriguingly, ‘not to give false peace (25); to acknowledge their own culpability in any situation of wrong (42-3 – a principle regularly stressed by the Desert Fathers); to be daily mindful of death (47); to deal without delay with evil thoughts, breaking them against the rock of Christ, and to make them known to the spiritual father (50-51 – again a familiar precept in the desert).

These and other precepts suggest that one of the basic requirements of the life is honesty.

First, honesty about yourself: it is necessary to know how to spot the chains of fantasy (which is exactly what ‘thoughts’, logismoi, meant for the Desert Fathers), to understand how deeply they are rooted in a weak and flawed will, and to make your soul inhospitable to untruth about yourself.

Exposure of your fantasies to an experienced elder is an indispensable part of learning the skills of diagnosis here.

In the background are the analyses of Evagrius and Cassian, pinpointing what simple boredom can do in a life where ordinary variety of scene and company is missing.

The mind becomes obsessional, self-enclosed, incapable of telling sense from nonsense; the reality of the other in its unyielding difference is avoided by retreat into the private world where your own preference rules unrestricted.

Hence the stress on making thoughts known: it is a simple way of propping open the door of the psyche, a way of making incarnate the consciousness that God sees us with complete clarity in every situation (49).

To become in this way open to your own scrutiny, through the listening ministry of the trusted brother or sister, is to take the first step towards an awareness of the brother or sister that is not illusory or comforting.

The recommendation against ‘false peace’, I suspect, belongs in this context: one of the ways in which we can retreat into privacy is the refusal to admit genuine conflict, to seek for a resolution that leaves me feeling secure without ever engaging the roots of difference.

If we are to become transparent, we must first confront the uncomfortable fact that we are not naturally and instantly at peace with all.

This could of course read like a commendation of the attitude which declines reconciliation until justice (to me) has been fully done; but I don’t think this is what Benedict is thinking of.

The recommendation follows two precepts about anger and resentment (22, 23), which, taken together with the warning against false peace, suggests that being wary of facile reconciliation is not about a suspicion of whether the other has adequately made reparation but about whether I have fully acknowledged and dealt with my own resentment.

It is a hesitation over my honesty about peace, not the other’s acceptability.

One of the most profound books I know on the subject of Christian community is the late Donald Nicholl’s wonderful journal of his time as Rector of the Ecumenical Institute at Tantur , between Jerusalem and Bethlehem, The Testing of Hearts.

A Pilgrim’s Journal (London 1989).

Here he records a conversation with a visiting Spanish scholar, who observes that many members of the community have come ‘with much heavy matter of unforgiveness and resentment lodged inside them from previous experience…it is precisely those who talk most about community-building who block the flow because they are the ones least aware of the matter of unforgiveness that they are carrying around with them, like a lead ball attached to their waists’ (p.62).

Is this what is meant by ‘false peace’ – to talk about community-building as an alibi for addressing the inner weight of anger and grief?

And it isn’t irrelevant that Nicholl contrasts the attitude of the Catalan Benedictines who live at the core of the community with that of the more transient scholars, who all come with an agenda that connects to other settings and other communities; the issues are different for those who are not living with stability.

All this gives something of a new edge to the commendation that the monk should be a peacemaker.

The precepts are clear enough: there should be no retaliation (29-32), no malicious gossip (40), no hatred or envy or party spirit (64-67).

And the climactic items in the list of tools make the priority of peacemaking very plain indeed:

70.

To pray for one’s enemies in the love of Christ.

71.

To make peace with one’s enemy before the sun sets.

72.

And never to despair of the mercy of God.

Stability requires this daily discipline of mending; it is the opposite of an atmosphere in which one’s place always has to be fought for, where influence and hierarchy are a matter of unceasing struggle.

As Professor Mayr-Harting notes, the idea that position in the community depends on seniority of entry (ch.63) may seem banal to us now, but it was a most unusual way of understanding hierarchy in late antiquity.

It seems obvious because the Rule has had such a sustained impact on the institutions of our culture.

But we need also to note that the same chapter that establishes the principle of seniority insists that specific responsibilities in the community do not depend on age but on the discernment of the abbot and that the order of age should not become a ground for insisting on rights and rank.

It is a delicate balance, but one whose goal is evidently to secure an ethos in which open conflict over position or influence is less likely.

And while rumour suggests that monastic communities are not completely immune to power struggles, the point is that the Rule provides a structure that will always challenge any assumption that conflict is the ‘default position’ in common life.

To put this another way, what the Rule outlines is what is to be the ‘currency’ of the community.

All communities need a medium of exchange, a language that assures their members that they are engaged in the same enterprise.

It involves common stories and practices, things that you can expect your neighbour to understand without explanation, ways and styles of doing and saying things.

Once again, Donald Nicholl has a pertinent story; this time, he is listening to a visiting English priest, who relates the experience of a university mission.

Fr Aidan is, naturally, interested in what the currency of the university is, and he spends time trying to pick up what people talk about and how.

‘ “And eventually”, Aidan said, “one day the penny dropped.

What did those people exchange with one another when they met?

You’d be surprised – they exchanged grievances.

So the currency of that University is grievance”’.

Nicholl comments by translating this into the image of the circulation of the blood in a body: what you receive is what you give, what you put into the circulation.

‘If you put in grievance, you will get back grievance’ (p.142).

And he refers to an elderly religious in Yorkshire, unobtrusive and to the untutored eye rather idle; but it is he ‘who sets the currency of goodness and kindness circulating through that community’ (143).

Without some such input into the ‘circulation’, communities will be at best dry and at worst deadly.

Peacemaking, then, is more than a commitment to reconciling those at odds.

On its own, a passion for reconciliation, we have seen, can be a displacement for unresolved angers and resentments.

What it may put into circulation is anxiety or censoriousness, certainly a situation of tense untruth when there is pressure to ‘make peace’ at all costs.

The peace which the Rule envisages is more like this ‘currency’ we’ve been thinking about, a habit of stable determination to put into the life of the body something other than grudges.

And for that to happen, the individual must be growing in the transparency we began with, aware of the temptations of drama, the staging of emotional turbulence in which the unexamined ego is allowed to rampage unchecked.

It’s all quite difficult for us in the twenty-first century.

We have been told – rightly – that it is bad to deny and repress emotion; equally rightly, that it is poisonous for us to be passive under injustice.

The problem, which half an hour on the street outside will confirm, and five minutes watching ‘reality’ programmes on television will reinforce as strongly as you could want, is that we so readily take this reasonable corrective to an atmosphere of unreality and oppression as an excuse for promoting the dramas of the will.

The denial of emotion is a terrible thing; what takes time is learning that the positive path is the education of emotion, not its uncritical indulgence, which actually locks us far more firmly in our mutual isolation.

Likewise, the denial of rights is a terrible thing; and what takes time to learn is that the opposite of oppression is not a wilderness of litigation and reparation but the nurture of concrete, shared respect.

The Rule suggests that if concern with right and reparation fills our horizon, the one thing that we shall not attain is unselfconsciousness – respect as another of those worn-smooth tools that are simply an extension of the body.

None of this is learned without the stability of the workshop.

The community that freely promises to live together before God is one in which both truthfulness and respect are enshrined.

I promise that I will not hide from you – and that I will also at times help you not to hide from me or from yourself.

I promise that your growth towards the good God wants for you will be a wholly natural and obvious priority for me; and I trust that you have made the same promise.

We have a lifetime for this.

Without the promise, the temptation is always for the ego’s agenda to surface again, out of fear that I shall be abandoned if the truth is known, fear that I have no time or resource to change as it seems as I must.

No-one is going to run away; and the resources of the community are there on my behalf.

I realise that I am describing the Body of Christ, not just a Benedictine community.

But how often do we understand the promises of baptism as bringing us into this sort of group?

How often do we think of the Church as a natural place for honesty, where we need not be afraid?

Hence the need for these localised, even specialised workshops, which take their place between two dangerous and illusory models of human life together.

On the one hand is what some think the Church is (including, historically, quite a lot of those who actually run it…): an institution where control is a major priority, where experts do things that others can’t, where orderly common life depends on a faintly magical command structure.

On the other hand is the modern and postmodern vision of human sociality: a jostle of plural commitments and hopes, with somewhat arbitrary tribunals limiting the damage of conflict and securing the rights of all to be themselves up to the point where they trespass on the territory of others - so that the other is virtually bound to be seen as the source of frustration.