The Tools for Good Works

What exactly are the monks doing in the monasteries? 

Instinctively, we might say “praying” or “fasting” or “doing penance.” They are “pursuing holiness.” The point of it all, of course, is union with God. What monks are doing is drawing near to the Lord.

There are certain “tools,” Benedict says, that enable monks to do this. He compares the monastery to a “workshop where we are to toil faithfully” (4.78). What’s interesting, though, is that he does not say that the tools are difficult fasts, extreme penances, or extraordinary feats of prayer. In fact, the tools of the monks appear not too terribly different from the tools of the laity. 

Monks should love God and love their neighbor (4.1-2), Benedict says. They should keep the Ten Commandments (4.4-7). They must care for the poor, console those who are grieving, and offer help to those in need (4.18-19). They must forgive each other, get over their grudges, and cultivate sincerity (4.22-28). They must be industrious, temperate, chaste, and self-controlled (4.34-40). Above all, monks must love Jesus Christ (4.21), and they must act like him. When they are struck, they must turn the other cheek; when they have enemies, they must love and pray for them; they must never to “do to another what [they] do not want done to [themselves]” (4.9, 29-33). 

For me, the striking thing is that this is what all Christians must do. It’s true that Benedict requires his monks to fast and to make sacrifices (4.10-12), but Jesus commended this to all of his followers without exception (Mt 6:16). 

Lay Christians sometimes think of monks as otherworldly, as living a dramatically different form of life. It’s true that monasticism is extraordinary. But it’s also true that the fundamental call of the laity and of the monks is entirely the same. All Christians — monk or not — are called to the radical kind of love Benedict enumerated. In this sense, the Christian accountant has more in common with the monk than he does with the non-Christian accountant in the cubicle next to him. Indeed, the same things that are extraordinary of the monk are equally extraordinary of the lay Christian. They love radically; they forgive radically. What makes a monk different is not so much the tools he uses to sanctify his life but the workshop in which he uses them. The monk is holy in his monastery; the accountant is holy in his office. At bottom, Christianity is Christianity — at the grocery store, at the monastery, at the convent, at the dinner table. Whether monk or nun or layman or laywoman, the call is the same; the radicalness is the same; the love is the same.