For a General Chapter
in a Prophetic Spirit
(Paper written
in preparation for the General Chapter of 1971)
During the last meeting of the Consilium Generale I expressed the hope
that the next General Chapter would be a "prophetic" Chapter, rather
than a Chapter with a predominantly legislative concern. This suggestion seems
to have aroused some favourable reactions at the Consilium, and afterwards
several persons -- Capitulants as well as other members of the Order -- have
asked me to clarify my ideas on the subject. That is my intention in the following
pages. I am quite aware of my total inexperience as a "Capitulant"
so that I hope that those who do not share my opinions will have the charity
to read them with a touch of good humour.
Our Cistercian
founders thought of our Order as a community, a sort of "larger Cîteaux,"
living in fraternal charity its fidelity to the same ideal. For them the General
Chapter was founded as a means of "revitalizing the bonds of peace and
mutual charity," and where they might handle questions of "the salvation
of souls," and if need be, where they might decide what should be corrected
or added to the observance of the Rule and of the prescriptions of the Order."
It seems quite clear from a simple reading of the Charter of Charity that
the primary object of the Chapter was living out in a concrete way their mutual
charity, whereas its legislative character, though admittedly real, was of
secondary importance.
In the course of
the centuries it seems that the two roles have been re-versed and the General
Chapter has become mostly an organ for administrative and legislative ends.
In our times when revision of the whole legislative organization is to be
undertaken, there is a risk of this tendency becoming dangerously over-emphasized.
Is it not a symptom of this that in the past several years there was a tendency
to suppress the reading of the Visitation reports, when it was precisely in
this element of the Chapter that the "communion" aspect had been
preserved -- although this element had become perhaps sclerotic and a mere
formality in many cases?
From now on, the many problems that
the General Chapter is called upon to face, as well as the increase in the
number of persons participating in the assembly, will force the General Chapter
to revise its mode of procedure and the methods of working together The danger
here is to think of this adaptation -- as also of the general government of
the Order -- simply in terms of administrative functionality. But, for a General
Chapter, or for the whole Order, or for a single community on the local level,
"good functioning" cannot be an end
in itself. It would be quite easy for the administrative machine to run empty!
The requirements
of the work to be accomplished in the past few years have forced us to increase
the structures (commissions, sub-commissions, councils, committees, etc. etc.),
and that on the level of the whole Order, as well as of the Regions and local
communities. That also carries with it a danger, for it could easily lead
to a sort of totalitarian system of renewal, based admittedly on participation,
but which often ends up by killing spontaneity and, in the long run, participation
itself. The unfolding of institutional initiatives in order to stimulate a
greater dynamism at the grass roots often ends up by inducing attitudes of
passivity.
If we go too far
in this direction, it is to be feared that chances for a real spiritual renewal
are going to be slim. A Chapter with a predominantly legislative orientation
works within a given system, recognized and accepted as such, the structures
of which cannot be questioned. It is a universal observation in all spheres
of human activity that, as soon as a system becomes over-organized it generally
becomes intolerant towards members considered non-conformist. By its method
of procedure, such a system tends either to assimilate or eliminate the "prophets,"
i.e. those who are more far-seeing and sensitive to certain needs that call
for a modification of structures, or to certain demands that are too compromising.
In a short article that seems to have been too generally overlooked, Thomas
Merton has described with an exquisite sense of humour – along with a genuine
prophetic intuition -- how we take great care in our institutions, not to
let the Holy Spirit get out of hand![1] And yet, the history of religious life is there to prove
that genuine movements of spiritual renewal were the work of charismatic persons
and charismatic communities (often non-conformist), and not the doings of
a committee ad hoc.
In the long run,
the most fundamental problems which monastic life has to grapple with are
not problems that can be resolved by legislation. There exist tensions and
antinomies which are essential to monastic life, and which it would be illusory
to expect to handle theoretically by rules and regulations. They have no solution
except through a lived experience on the level of the local community. I cannot
forego including here a splendid citation from Martin Buber:
"Man's religious situation, his
being there in the Presence, is
characterised by its essential and .indissoluble antinomy. The nature of its
being determines that this antinomy is indissoluble. He who accepts the thesis
and rejects the antithesis does injury to the significance of the situation.
He who tries to think out a synthesis destroys the significance of the situation.
He who strives to make the antinomy into a relative matter abolishes the significance
of the situation. He who wishes to carry through the conflict of the antinomy
other than with his life transgresses the significance of the situation. The significance of the situation
is that it is lived, and nothing but lived, continually ever anew, without
foresight, without forethought, without prescription, in the totality if its
antinomy"[2].
Quite a number of these antinomies
which are current in the life of the local communities are on the Program
of the General Chapter: Separation from the world / Openness to the world;
Development of human values / monastic asceticism; Authority and coresponsibility,
etc. It would be quite useless to set up laws, no matter how general they
be, in these fields. The Chapter, to my way of thinking, should handle these
questions from another angle. What do I mean ? To explain myself, I feel I
must first propose some reflections on the subject of the authority of the
General Chapter, looking at it from a wider point of view: of authority in
general in the monastic life, and before all else, on the level of the local
community.
Even if Obedience
remains in its essence an evangelical reality which does not change, the forms
it has taken on in the Church and in the religious life, in the course of
the centuries, have always been conditioned by the sociological structures
of the time. The ideas which we formed of it up till the last few decades
have been the same as those of Christianity in the Middle Ages. The
"Speechmaker, you speak too late. Just a little time ago
you would have been able to believe in your own speech, now you no longer
can. . . .the masters smile at you with superior assurance, but death is in
their hearts. They tell you they suited the apparatus to the circumstances,
but you notice that from now on they can only suit themselves to the apparatus
- so long, that is to say, as it permits them"[3].
In times past, monks played the part
of pioneers in this field. It is a matter of common knowledge, for example,
that democratic representation is a monastic invention, and the British Parliament
borrowed a great deal of its structure from the model of the Charter of Charity
of Cîteaux.[4] It would be regrettable to see adopted today without
distinction, a sort of parliamentarianism, several centuries late and just
at the moment when this form of government is on the point of disappearing...
Since the Council,
a great need has been felt of having everyone actively participate in the
life of the Community. Fine! But as our ideas of government and authority
remained unchanged, this has only ended up in complicating tremendously the
administrative machinery, in order to have as many as possible take part in
it. This has led to a sort of cancerous multiplication of commissions, committees,
etc... But it isn't certain that we succeeded in interesting very many people
in government, or even in participation itself.
Just the same,
I do not want my intentions to be misconstrued. My opinion is not that we
have gone too far, but not far enough -- and I understand this "not-far-enough"
as a question of kind and not quantity. For to my mind, the true meaning of evangelical communion
goes far beyond mere democracy and governmental participation. As long as
we think in terms of these categories, we are bound to maintain the old dichotomy
between the community on one side, and authority on the other -- looked upon,
more or less explicitly, as something exterior to it. For the fact that authority
is shared by a more or less great number of persons or organisms changes nothing
in the system. At the utmost even if an experiment of a Community without
a superior should be tried out, the same system still holds if the deliberating
numbers of a group consider authority as something exterior to and above each
of the persons making up the group. For all that, a koinonia does not necessarily exist, and
everyone knows how the dictatorship of a majority can be even more uncompromising
than that of a single person.
A community is
essentially a grouping of brothers or sisters who are "called" --
each one, personally -- by God. They unite in order to be mutually responsible
for each other, to share together their ideal, their search, their groping,
their spiritual experience, their interpretations of God's Word in the daily
events of life, etc.
Christian obedience consists in accepting
the will of God as one's own. Obedience in a community or coenobitical life
consists in accepting to read the will of God in one's brothers, in admitting
to be conditioned by a Community of brothers in one's spiritual conduct. The
ideal community-the one where people would be "one heart and one spirit"
-- would, of course, need no superior, for it would live its obedience in
a complete and continual consensus. (The submission to hierarchical authority,
which was given by Christ to the Apostles and to their successors, is a question
of another sort altogether.) But as the ideal Community does not exist, our
religious communities normally must have in their midst - and I emphasize
in their midst and not over them -- a member of the fraternity to whom they confide the
role of helping the community in its search for the will of God, and of guiding
it in the up-building of that consensus.
And in contrast
to the ideal community, there is to be found the community -- and it is not
at all an imaginary situation -- where the existence of the communion and
the links of cohesion are so weak or inexistent that the consensus, and even
the search of such consensus, or the common effort to heed the Word of God,
would not be possible. The only solution in this case would be to hand over
to someone the business of making decisions in the name of all... which corresponds
more or less to the notion quite commonly held of authority and obedience.
But isn't that a case of erecting into a system a way of exercising "authority"
required by the abnormal situation of a community life in a state of degeneracy?
"You know that among the pagans the rulers lord it over them and their
great men make their authority felt. This is not to happen among you."
(Mt. 20:25-26).
In a community
where community life is lived intensely enough, the role of the "superior,"
so-called, should be a role of animation... And here I open
a parenthesis to explain that, after consulting with an expert in English
literature, I decided to continue to use this neologism, even if for some
readers this term "animation" might evoke Donald Duck, Walt Disney
or cartoon characters. It should be remembered that sociologists and scientists
of allied fields are using this term increasingly in the sense given it by
their French colleagues. The word "animation" generally refers to
an "in-spiriting" or "life-imparting" experience; a form
of leadership which consists in arousing or awakening the development of latent
energies of a group, and in being a unifying and cohesive factor in the development
and auto-formation of such a group.
In social animation, the animator is the
person who, after taking the pulse of a group, acts as pacesetter, facilitator
and catalyst for the individuals and the group. All this and more is implied
in the case of the "spiritual animator." The spiritual animator
is a pacesetter in that he proclaims the Lord's message by his life. He takes
the pulse of the group and of individuals to discern where the Spirit is leading
them, and as a catalyst he facilitates the Lord's activity in and through
the group members. He does not impart life but serves as a channel and instrument
for the Source and Giver of life in its fullness.[5] The animator does not make the decisions
for the group; he helps the group make them -- not in the manner of a president
of an assembly who proposes an issue to the vote of all, but as a sort of
catalyst of individual energies which facilitate the movement toward a consensus
by the group. The group will also expect that he act as its "conscience"
by being the "memory" of the common options, already agreed upon
or previously taken. Or again, to use an expression of Paul Claudel, he will
be the délégué à
l'attention, i.e. the one who is delegated to be attentive in the name of
all, whose duty is to recall to the attention of the brethren their commitments,
their duties, their faults, responsibilities... a role which corresponds rather
nearly to that of the prophet in the Bible.
To my mind, the
mental picture or image of an "Abbot-father" or an "Abbot-teacher"
is attached to a set of sociological contexts belonging to another age, and
to try to cultivate it in this day and age may combine in generating or supporting
ambiguities. And that without taking into account that these terms correspond
to a kind of relationship which, by its very nature, excludes complete reciprocity.[6]
I explained above
how the ideas of authority and obedience at the different stages of the history
of religious life depended on the sociological situation of the times. What
this was at the time of St Benedict, or that of Cîteaux, corresponds pretty
much to the description of the society of those times, given us by one of
the best sociologists of our time, Andrew Greeley:
"In the Teutonic
tribe or the medieval feudal manor, the leader was a man who, by virtue of
superior wisdom, or superior strength, or both, was expected to know all the
answers to the problems that the community might face. His followers did not
have to understand either the problems or the answers; it was merely enough
for them to accept his wisdom and/or strength, and to respond to his instructions.
In simple societies, where skills are not complex and information gathering
is relatively simple, the "answer-giving" leader is all that is required".[7]
From the point
of view of the sociologist, monasteries at the time of St Benedict corresponded
pretty well with this description. They needed such a leader: a father, a
master, a teacher who asked the questions and gave the answers. Always from
the same point of view of sociology, the situation in which we find ourselves
today is quite different. I borrow its description from the same source.
"But in the modern world, no single man van be expected
to have either the information or the skills necessary for making decisions.
He must rely on the collaboration of both technical experts and representatives
of the rank and file of his organization to provide him with the information
and skills without which adequate decisions cannot be made. Decision making,
then, in the modern world, is essentially a collegial process and the leader
frequently does little more than ratify the decision that has been made jointly
by his followers and his technical advisers. The real challenge of leadership,
then, is rather different. Unlike the leader of the simple society, the leader
of an organization in a complex society must ask questions, not provide answers.
He has been chosen as leader precisely because he is expected to have clear
insights into the values that an organization is pursuing, and the ability
to ask penetrating questions about how successful the organization is in its
pursuit of its values.
"The leader
is a man who sees the "big picture," the man who has the "vision"
of the purpose of the organization, a vision on which he relies to challenge
his followers to look beyond their individual, day-to-day goals and think
about their common purposes. It is a leader's job, then, to prophesy, to challenge,
to question, to refuse to be content with complacency, mediocrity or dullness.
In his own vision and enthusiasm, he incarnates the purposes of the organization;
he symbolizes its values.
"It is easy
to answer questions. But to ask questions and to preside over the communal
consensus of response to those questions is far more difficult. Paradoxically
enough, the leader who asks questions and presides over consensus has far
more power in the organization than does the man who is content merely with
providing responses to questions, for the latter is very likely to find that
those who ask the questions do not really take his answers very seriously.[8]"
Would it represent
a depreciation of the virtue of obedience to understand in this manner the
exorcise of authority in a monastic community? I do not think so. All obedience
is directed finally to God. The mediations to which man binds himself in his
seeking God's will are human structures that he forms to reach the knowledge
of this divine will. And so those structures must be adapted concretely to
the psychological and sociological needs of the persons for whom they were
established. In today's communities, where ail have a sufficient education,
where there are several who can teach and guide their brothers much better
than the abbot in many fields, and where all are invited to reflect on the
orientations, present or to come, of the religious life and of the Order,
what we need are prophets, leaders who can ask the telling questions, who
can bring their brothers an intuitive and global vision of the monastic ideal
and the demands of the time, who can prick the consciences of their brothers
and help them read God's will, to accept freely and community-wise its demands.
Is "obedience" anything but this "reading" and this acceptance
of God's will?
Thus it is evident
that the function of the superior cannot be limited to that of a distributing-machine
for permissions and orders, nor to that of a professor of monastic spirituality.
At the same time it is clear that the function of animator, of which I have
spoken, is capital for the renewal of monastic life. It would be dangerous
and sterile to work out structures which would suppress such a personal role,
or lessen it to the extreme limit, in such wise that all the function of leadership
would end up with commissions or impersonal organisms.
All this may seem
irrelevant to the question of the General Chapter. And yet it is not. For
our idea of the role of the latter will be in function to our concept of authority,
in the same way that our idea of the Order will depend on the one we have
of the local community.
A monastic Order
is not an organization, but a living organism. It is not a society, but a
community of communities. Their bond of union is their working towards a common
ideal or plan, and communion in pursuing and putting to effect that common
ideal. This communion presupposes and demands exchanges of every type. In
all events, it is the primary and fundamental reality in the Order -and not
the existence of a central government, which is rather to serve this communion.
If the latter were not a living reality, bonds on the juridical plane would
be a fiction. And that is why our efforts towards renewal should aim at intensifying
the communion between the (individual) communities much more than at oiling
the cogs of an administrative machine.
The General Chapter
should then, above all, be an instrument of this fraternal communion. But
by this I mean much more than simply the fart of meeting on a fraternal basis
of sympathy and affection. The important thing for those who are the délégués à l'attention in their respective communities, is to meet in order to be attentive together
to the Spirit, to confront their "vision" of the monastic project,
to render themselves more sensitive to the problems of the monastic life and
of the Church as a whole, to "take the pulse" of the Order and to
come to a more lively awareness of the movements and aspirations existing
in the Order. From this point of view, the Chapter will have an eschatological
orientation as well, in the sense that the eschatological is there when you
have matters where the end is already in the beginnings, or implied in them.
Such a Chapter will be a communal effort of awareness (conscientization) on the plane of the
Order. It will give attention and sympathy to all the new movements, either
in the Order or in the monastic life in general, quite aside from whether
or not those movements could be accepted in the Order. Prophetic writings,
like some of Merton's texts, should be examined and meditated together. We
should be attentive in all humility to whatever is thrown as a challenge to
monks, either in the world or in the Church today: the rapid growth of the
charismatic Christian communities (communautés
de base), the hippie movement, the seeking for spiritual experience by
the use of drugs, life in "communes," the attraction of oriental
spirituality on the young, etc. For it is in function of this whole context
that monastic life must be re-examined today.
A General Chapter
is a human group and, as such, needs certain structures established by legislation.
And it is the same thing for the Order itself. But we must not forget that
the purpose of such legislation and structures
is simply to give character and stability to our conduct in matters of minor
importance (nos comportements accidentels),
in order to release all one's attention for the basic issues. It would
be an upheaval of values if the General Chapter devoted a large part of its
energy to its own functioning and machinery.
It seems to me
that all this can influence the question of the Constitutions. During the
last Chapter I tried to draw attention to the danger of canonizing in the
Constitutions a sort of "official theology" of Cistercian monastic
life. It
was a little bit the orientation of the New Charter
of Charity, a plan that anyway has been set aside. But it seems to me that
in the projects that are circulating at present, there are other dangers:
that of expressing the fundamental values of religious life, or of Cistercian
spirituality, by means of juridical prescriptions, and that of wanting to
solve by legislation the antinomies of which I spoke above, and which cannot
be solved outside of the actual life. I am wondering too, if we are not "wasting,"
in a certain manner, a large sum of precious energy in trying to find a form
for Constitutions, the contents of which will be made known to us only by
the experience of the years to come.
At the same time this allows me to
give a word of explanation on my article "The Cistercian Nuns at the
Crossroads." If there I was trying to show the advantages of juridical
autonomy for our Sisters, it was because I was not envisaging the possibility
in fact of a change in orientations for the General Chapter of the monks before
a number of years. It seemed to me then that to establish mixed General Chapters
-- with all that this implies from a juridical point o£ view -- was to devote
a considerable sum of energy to getting structures under way that were destined
to disappear a few years later. If the General Chapter takes, this very year,
the direction that the Consilium Generale seems to have wanted, that is to
say, if it becomes more and more an instrument of communion and less one of
government, the question of relations between the two branches of the Order
will take on a different colour, as Dom Flavian has pointed out to us in his
letter of March 4, 1971
The Regional Conferences have been,
up to now, in a very large measure what it seems to me the General Chapter
should become. They are essentially an instrument of communion and of awareness
(conscientization). They allow the
representatives of the different communities to become aware together of life
as it is lived in the Region. Between Chapters, the Consilium Generale could
in its turn be a very useful instrument of communion between the Regions.
There is no objection to considering the same Consilium as a means for the
Regions to participate in the decisions concerning the whole Order, which
might become necessary between the Chapters. But this "government"
function would have to remain secondary and subordinate to the one of communion.
If, as it has been proposed, the Consilium
Generale is formed by the Regional Presidents, then their role should take
on a new character. It seems to me that the President of each Region should
make a point of keeping up with everything that takes place in the Region:
the hopes, the tensions, the new experiments, likewise with sociological and
ecclesiastical evolution, and with the orientations of religious life as a
whole, etc.... And after every meeting of the Consilium Generale, he should
inform the whole Region of what he has learnt and discovered during the meeting,
and of the new outlook that he has on the monastic vocation, and on its demands
before God today.
As for the role
of the Abbot General, his function within the Order seems to me more and more
important. That he be freed as much as possible from all kinds of administrative
tasks is undoubtedly an excellent thing. But I believe that it is very important
that we keep within the Order someone who fulfils for it the role of "animator,"
that is, the function of the local abbot in his community. It seems to me
that there lies the role that is needed for the Abbot General. It can be very
useful for the Order to have an Abbot General who visits the communities --
not to make canonical Visitations -- but to enter into personal contact with
each member of the Order, to be a bond of fraternal communion by the warmth
of his human relations; to create, for instance, links of friendship by causing
contacts between persons living in different latitudes, but who have the same
preoccupations. In this way he could become sensitive to the problems and
aspirations of each one, and help each one to become aware of the problems
and aspirations of all. That is certainly a role that might be called “prophetic”
and could in no way be entrusted to a commission or to some organism.
* * *
In the history
of the Church there are two types of reform. At certain periods, for instance
the XIIth century, we see a tidal wave, an irresistible movement of the Spirit
which brings about an awareness, generally and universally, of certain Gospel-values
and of new needs in the Church. This charismatic movement then raises up a
fresh life, the energy of which cracks open the old structures and generates
new ones. At other times the need for reform and renewal is apparent only
to an élite, more intuitive and clear-sighted, which uses its influence to
change the structures and to bring the others, in this indirect way, to a
new awareness. Perhaps it is more particularly to this latter type that the
renewal in the Church and in the Order since Vatican II would belong. But
it might well be dangerous to go too far in this direction, because to make
the structures and legislation into pedagogical instruments would be to deviate
both from their purpose. It seems to me more important today to devote all
our energy to an effort of "awareness - taking" (conscientization).
What we need is a charismatic renewal and not a technocratic reform. That
is why I think we need a Chapter of a prophetic nature much more than a legislative
one. Would it be utopian to hope for it?
March 19, 1971
[1] Thomas Merton. "Final Integration : Toward a 'Monastic
Therapy'." Monastic Studies,
n 6, 1968, pp 87-99 -- especially 95-96.
[2] Martin Buber. I and Thou.
N.Y: Charles
Scribners Sons, 1958 (2d ed, paperback), p 95.
[3] Ibid, p
48
[4] Cf Jean-Jacques Walter, « L'Abbé et les formes modernes de l'autorité », in Collectanea Cisterciensia, 31, (1969),
pp 161-163.
[5] Cf NOTE in Bulletin of the Canadian Religious Conference, December 1970.
[6] Cf Martin Buber's Address, "Education" in Between Man & Man. N.Y: Macmillan Paperbacks
Edition, 1965, pp 83-113.
[7] Andrew Greeley. "Sociology and Church Structure,"
in Concilium. N.Y: Herder &
Herder, 1970 (October), n 58. Burns £ Oates: 1970 (Oct), vol. 8, n.6, p.27.
[8] Ibid, p. 28