A Reflection on Community
By Sister Susan Hutchens, Prioress
I have been a member of community for 45 years. What keeps me faithful to the Monastic Way is rooted in my commitment to my community, and fidelity to a monastic way of life. The monastic ideal of Conversatio or Fidelity refers to all the elements of our lives. As a Benedictine, fidelity includes our commitment to prayer, community, humility, obedience, stability, and other values such as hospitality, and stewardship.
In her book, The Rule of Benedict, a Spirituality for the 21st Century, Joan Chittister explains “it is the support of community and the providence of God upon which [monks] are to depend, not on their savings, not on their business acumen, not on their relatives and connections”.
Along with Prayer, my community at St. Mary Monastery keeps me faithful. I have said before, and I continue to believe, that we do not go to God alone. I recently read an article in a “Soul Searching” column in the NCR by Becky Eldredge in which she said: “Thanks to God for reminding me that none of us is ever alone in finding our way forward in life”. [Becky Eldredge, NCR 9/18-10/1/2020 p. 16]
The community calls me often to surrender my own will and do what together is chosen as best. That is what discernment asks of us. The community calls me to live with those chosen by God to be here, even when sometimes I question why. Common life is not easy, nor is married life I’m certain. Growing older together, witnessing the final surrender of others as they are called home to God, and rejoicing with others when they make their perpetual professions - those are the things about community that keep me faithful.
Stability, as defined in the Rule in Chs, 4, 58, and 60, also keeps me faithful. Benedict says at the end of Ch 4, on the “Tools of Good Works”: The workshop where we are to toil faithfully at all these tasks is the enclosure of the monastery and stability in the community. Well known to us as a friend, the now deceased Abbot Claude Peifer, from St. Bede Abbey, Peru IL, made a distinction between “stability of place” and “stability of heart.” One is defined by physical presence – the place. Stability of heart implies love for one’s monastery and one’s monastic community. It encompasses perseverance in living the cenobitic monastic life, as followed in a specific community, by observing poverty, silence, humility, and prayer as that group of monastics does. The place and the life are both significant.
Through fidelity to the monastic life, we support one another in our professed lives. We do not just remain faithful for ourselves, but also to help one another do the same. Community affirms our worth, goodness, and gifts; and sometimes it draws from us gifts which we never realized we possessed. Then we use that goodness and our gifts to support others.
Archbishop Rowan Williams, Welsh Anglican theologian and former Archbishop of Canterbury, said: “Home is God’s company”. May your own “community” – small or large, family or extended, chosen or given to you, always be ‘home’ for you, because you are in God’s company.