Beyond the Summit
In Preparation for the General Chapter of 1987
by : Armand Veilleux
Summits are not usually places
where one will want to live. They are
locations above the realm of normal and usual life. It is challenging and thrilling to climb up
there from time to time, in order to have a look at the valley and at the
far distant horizon in all directions. But
eventually one has to come down and resume normal occupations. And every professional mountaineer will tell
you that coming down is as tricky and dangerous as going up. (Probably as
many expeditions have been wiped up by avalanches coming down from Mount Everest
as climbing up).
For quite a few years now
we have been very seriously planning our "Summit" -- and, alas!, the preparation is not finished yet. Part of the planning
at which we have perhaps not looked sufficiently is that concerning the "after
Summit" period.[1]
Few people make a profession
of mountaineering. It is a risky business
anyway. But one does not need to do it too long before it becomes an addiction.
For twenty years now, we have been working on our Constitutions.
Although many monks and nuns could not careless about that work, some
have developed quite an interest in it. Perhaps an addiction. Trying
to find the final solution to the complex problem of the Unity of the two
Branches of the Order may become compulsive, just like trying to solve the
Rubik cube. (Have you ever realized that the Rubik cube is much nicer when
the colors are all mixed than when finally some smart child has figured out
how to bring together all the little squares of the
same color on each face of the cube?...)
With the need to revise our legislation, after
Vatican II, the nature of the General Chapter has changed radically. Most of what we have been doing ever since has
been just that: preparing some new legislation. At the Summit Meeting in Rome,
next December, there will be very few abbesses and abbots from the period
anterior to this grand law-making enterprise.
Even if we do finalize our Constitutions at that Summit, the Holy See
will probably not accept all our solutions without change and/or without dialogue.
Which means that some important questions will probably have to be
discussed again at some future Regional Meetings and some future General Chapter
(or Summit Meeting, or General Assembly, or whatever you want to call it). The temptation will be great to continue to
legislate. And even if our Constitutions were approved as such, we all know
that the "Statutes" are of the authority of the General Chapter,
and there will probably be many of them that we will feel like adapting at
the next General Chapter... Are we
going, at last, to break that spiral? Endlessly to continue to make laws could
be a very effective way of avoiding more challenging issues of life.
Sure, we have worked very
seriously over the past years, preparing the invasion of our juridical promised
land. Some of our regional tribes have
even sent emissaries to inspect the land of Kibbutzah. [2]
Some of these have come back with tales of rich harvest of marvelous fruits,
other with tales of Nephilim and other frighteningly dangerous creatures (Num. 13,33).
So we have decided to be very prudent about it and we have surveyed
all the possible avenues. All the forms of evolution have been suggested,
including previously unknown nuances of static development and evolving status
quo.
Human imagination is very
fertile, especially when the complementarity of the two sexes enters in. Therefore
still new formulas could probably be found. The complication is that all the problems are
intertwined. The exact role you give to the Father Immediate of a monastery
of nuns depends on the type of filiation you adopt for the feminine branch
of the Order, and this, of course, depends on whether you aim at autonomy
through parallel structures or through integrated ones... Possibilities are
really endless --although they are conditioned by the grace of God and the
good graces of Rome --,and we could easily continue
to move the parts of the puzzle around till the end of the century if not
till the Parousia.
My suggestion is that we should
all come to the Via Aurelia Summit with the aim of settling for some reasonable
solution and go on with life... I believe
that some of the formulas that have been proposed are more in line with the
general evolution of the Church and the world than others. But, frankly, whatever is the formula that enters
into the text of our Constitutions, I don't think it will have a very great
influence on the evolution of the life in the Order. Life, in its development, follows its own laws.
Of course, some very bad legislation could stifle life; but of the various possibilities offered,
everyone has some good points. And even apart from that, the only difference
between them is that one solution may become obsolete a bit quicker than the
other. They all will become obsolete eventually.
So, why not agree on some reasonably good legislation
as soon as possible; then joyfully celebrate our consensus, and move on to
some other serious business? And the
most important business will be to establish an agenda for the Order for the
years to come. If we don’t establish such an agenda, each Region will develop
its own, probably without paying too much attention to what should be the
common agenda of the Order. And, of
course, there will be the danger of a backlash as the one we had at the Chapter
of 1971 after the charismatic Chapter of 1969.
May I suggest a few points
that could be on that agenda? First, I will not surprise anyone by saying
that I still believe that the area of formation is of the utmost importance. So, after we have finished writing our Ratio
Institutionis, we will have to study much more seriously, as an Order, the
whole question of formation, that is the whole process through which someone,
in the context of the Cistercian monastic way of life, gradually becomes an
integrated adult woman or man, and a mature Christian, opening her/himself
more and more to the grace of a contemplative union with God.
A second question that is not going to diminish in importance in the
years to come, is that of the feminist movement.
I have been interested in feminist theology for some time (for purely
academic reasons, of course). It is fascinating to realize how all the civilizations
of humankind have been dominated for thousands of years by various shades
of male sexism. Almost everything in
culture is sexist, beginning with all the languages of the world -- which
makes it very difficult to develop a non inclusive language, and accounts
for the frequent awkwardness of the attempts at non inclusive translations
of the Bible or liturgical texts.
It is easy to discard feminist theology or even
the whole feminist movement, on account of some of its radical expressions.
(A good example of radicalism would be the writings of Mary Daly, Beyond
God the Father, Gyn/Ecology, and Pure Lust). But other expressions of
the same movement are characterized by ponderation and solid scholarship,
like, for example, the book of Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, In Memory of
Her . For the last decade or so, all that questioning
has taken a larger and larger place in the annual meetings of theologians
(like the meetings of the American Academy of Religion) and in the Conferences
of Major Superior (especially in countries, like Canada and in Latin America,
where the Conferences of Major Superiors have been mixed for quite a few decades).
Feminist theology has obliged us to revise our
reading of the Scripture, of the Church Fathers and our interpretation of
Tradition. Its influence on the life of the Church has been considerable,
and much of the evolution of the feminine branch of our Order for the last
thirty years is largely -- albeit indirectly -- indebted to it. All the questioning
coming from that feminist movement has always been implicit in our discussions
about the Unity of the Order, but has so far not surfaced very much. It is an issue (or a series of issues) that
we will have to confront directly and very seriously in the future, unless
we want to resume the old Gnostic dream of the return to a supposed original
androgyny. Maybe we will be able to do it with more serenity after we have
at least provisionally solved the juridical aspect of it.
The particular situation of our Order might enable
us to bring to the solution of that question a positive contribution, at the
level of life rather than at the level of noisy declarations. But in order to be able to make that contribution
it will be important for us to reach a deep awareness of all the problems
involved. We should also avoid complacency,
since the attitude of the Order towards the nuns has been ambiguous at best
from the start. According to a modern historian, nuns had to "worm"
their way into the Order in spite of the reluctance, and often opposition,
of the monks.[3]
A third question that we will have to face more and more seriously
is how to prepare people to grow old in a monastic environment. Some people age beautifully. Other just wither.
In communities where the average age is often quite high (in many communities
it is in the 60ies, and in some in the 70ies), this becomes every day a more
crucial problem. The fact of having large groups of old people with very few
young ones is a relatively new phenomenon; it creates all kinds of problems
to the solution of which monastic tradition has little to contribute directly.
And it is a problem facing all the Western societies.
In several countries of the Third World, where
we have more and more monasteries, it is just the other way around. A few generations ago there was in most of those
countries a very high rate of infant mortality, which medical progress has
reduced drastically. Nature, however, has not immediately adjusted itself
to that rate of survival, so that the number of births keep being very high,
with, as a result, societies where the number of very young people is extremely
great in proportion to the people in the forties or above; which creates other
types of problems for the "old ones"...
A fourth and final point in my agenda: the problems of developing
countries are becoming every day more complex and almost depressing. Since
our Order is, fortunately, more and more present in those parts of the world,
it would be very important for us to reflect on the implications and demands
of such a situation for the Order, not only at a spiritual level, but also
at a sociological, economic, and even political level. The first step would be a collective evaluation
of the very rich experience of the last thirty years or so. A whole General Chapter could be dedicated to
listening to the experience of our foundations in Africa, Latin America and
Asia. It could be a fruitful challenge
to the monasteries of Europe and North America.
Those are only a few suggestions
of what could be the agenda of the Order. What I really want to say is that, after the
Summit, we will have to come down to the valley; and those are some of the problems we
will have to cope with. It might be
good to have a look at them from the vantage view point at the Summit.
Armand VEILLEUX
Holy Spirit Abbey
Conyers, Georgia
20 May 1987
[1] Actually, when Brother Patrick gave me an advance copy of this Supplement,
with the title Toward the Summit, and asked me to write a Foreword I
immediately thought that a nice title for that Foreword could be Down to
earth. But that might have been a little, well, too
"down to earth".
[2] Hebrew word for collegiality. Same root as kibbutz.
[3] The expression is from Janet Summers who, at the last Cistercian Conference
in Kalamazoo (May 1987), gave an excellent paper where she described the
four phases of the gradually and slow incorporation of the nuns in the Order,
from 1125 to 1228: a)unofficial association; b) informal affiliation; c)
silent incorporation; d) public incorporation.