Education: A Benedictine Labor

Many of you know that, for the first two weeks in January, I was back in California at my seminary, which is a training school for those who are becoming priests and deacons in the Episcopal Church. While I missed my family a great deal, I benefited from this time immensely, and what I learned will continue to influence my future ministry as a priest in the church for years and years to come. I’m grateful to Dr. Baker and the rest of the school community for coming alongside me and offering support on this journey.

What I want to do today is to say a little bit about my time there at the seminary and then talk for a few minutes about some connections I want to make to ESA.

First of all, my schedule during those two weeks started with gathering for Morning Prayer at 7:30 every morning, which ended about 7:55. That left just enough time to grab a cup of coffee before class began at 8:00. My first class would last from 8:00 - 12:00. Then we had an hour and a half break for lunch, and then the second class would last from 1:30 - 5:30. Evening Prayer or Eucharist was at 6:00, so our day was over at 6:30 or 7:00 in the evening, leaving just a little time for dinner and study before getting a good night’s sleep for the next long day.

In some ways, this might seem like a grueling schedule, but for me, it was a peaceful, energizing, restorative time. Starting and ending the day with morning and evening prayer with my seminary friends was a wonderful bookend for the day, to help me center and calm my spirit in preparation for the day in the morning, and to help me approach the end of the day with gratitude and reflection in the evening.

What we do for those two weeks at seminary is not unlike what monks in the Christian tradition have been doing for over a thousand years. Their lives are characterized, in the term popularized by St. Benedict, by ora et labora, by prayer and work. Monasteries have taken up various kinds of work over the years, but the same general principle applies. They pray, and they work. And they spend their days doing this, every day, all the days of their lives.

In fact, they pray eight times a day, starting at around 2 AM and continuing every three hours until around 7 PM. For many years, Christian monks kept many of the great works of Western literature, history, and music alive by literally copying them, by hand. This kind of work was done in what was called a scriptorium, a place filled with desks. Sometimes the monks weren’t as enthusiastic about their work, as you can see from comments scattered in the margins of medieval manuscripts.

To this day, most monasteries adopt some kind of work that is particular to their time and place. While some monks do still make copies of the Bible by hand, most monasteries do other kinds of work. Some monasteries make beer, some make cheese, some keep bees, some make organic gardens, etc. I recently read an article by Jonathan Malesic about a different kind of work done by a monastic community in New Mexico in the 1990s.

I’ll read you the first paragraph of description: “In a remote canyon in northern New Mexico in the mid-1990s, Benedictine monks of the Monastery of Christ in the Desert spent their mornings at a dozen Gateway computers in a room with a dirt floor, creating the internet. A crucifix hung on the wall right above a whiteboard where they sketched out webpages. The monks were doing a digital-age version of work that Benedictines have done for more than a thousand years. They were scribes.”

These monks were creating webpages for churches, art galleries, music ensembles, and other kinds of entities that wanted a presence on this very new phenomenon called the World Wide Web. You have to know that creating webpages and getting them hosted on a server was a difficult task back then and one that required a good deal of technical knowhow, so the monks’ business began to flourish.

But then, as quickly as it had taken off, it stopped. Monks doing prayer eight times a day can’t ,as Malesic writes, “pull eighteen-hour shifts to fill orders. They can’t respond to clients’ emails while they’re praying the Liturgy of the Hours, studying, or eating—the activities that make up most of their day.” Whereas most companies in the same situation would have just hired more workers or encouraged people to work overtime, the monks couldn’t do that. It would go against the spirit of their entire lives and the reason they went to the desert in the first place. So they quit.

Why would a group of individuals with a great business model and plenty of opportunity to capitalize on their business model just quit? Malesic went to the desert to find out, and in doing so, he realized something important, something I think that these monks have to teach us here at ESA and in our wider culture. He says this:

“Over several days of working and praying and eating with the monks, I realized that the ceaseless, obsessive American work ethic was demonic, a demon that haunted me, and most of the people I knew. We are a society almost totally under its power. We assess people’s value by their jobs and demean anyone who can’t work. We forego vacation time, anxious to prove that we’re indispensable. We drive ourselves to burnout.”

Here’s the secret that the monks have been practicing for over a thousand years, the difference they have been able to find between their own approach to work and our own culture’s approach to work. At one point in his stay at the monastery, Malesic asks the monks if they get frustrated every time they are engaged in some activity or work and are interrupted by the bell ringing for prayer. What if the work remains undone? “You get over it,” was the monk’s reply. As Malesic realized, the monks “‘get over’ work so that they can get on with something much more important to them.”

“Un travail de bénédictin—literally, a Benedictine labor—is a French expression for the sort of project someone can only accomplish over a long time through patient, modest, steady effort. It’s the kind of thing that can’t be rushed: illuminating an entire Bible, writing a thousand-year history, recording the position of stars at each hour of the night and each day of the year. It’s work that doesn’t look good in a quarterly earnings report. It doesn’t maximize billable hours. It doesn’t get overtime pay. But it’s a way to work without the anxiety that drives us to put in long, intense hours and uproot our lives every few years in pursuit of ‘better’ jobs.”

Now: I realize that we are a school and not a monastery--though the first schools in Western Europe were begun and operated by monks, and so they still retain just a little bit of that monastic flavor. And as a school, we are not driven by the economic need to produce something that people will buy or consume. But there is a real danger that we fall into the trap that says that we, ourselves, are the product and that all of this exists just so we can be economic units in the larger system.

The monks, in other words, don’t worry about the quantity of their work so much as its quality. It is slow and patient work and, furthermore, the monks realize, just as did the men and women who built the great cathedrals of Europe, that the work will outlast them. They realize that they will never finish the work. They are part of a stream, carrying on a tradition, and when they are gone, others will pick up and continue on where they left off.

In schools, we often confuse grades and test scores, and even diplomas and degrees, with education. Grades and test scores and diplomas and degrees are the kinds of work that comes to an end. But education, true education, the willingness and openness to learn, is a Benedictine labor. It realizes that we are part of a great stream of learning and understanding the world around us, and that our part in that stream will one day come to an end. Our task as educators and students is to hand those traditions of wonder and openness to the next generation so that they can join the stream.

Friends, I want you to remember this, even though it goes against a lot of the noise around you.

The most telling image in Malesic’s article, and the one I’ll leave you with, is this. The tradition in a monastery, and something that we did in the seminary environment as well, is to chant the Psalms during these times of prayer, which are called “offices.” In the monasteries, these chants are often slowed down and even have pauses between each verse to slow them down even more. As Malesic reflects, “the pause between verses extended too long for me. We were wasting precious milliseconds. The monks could prayer faster, but they don’t want to. They don’t have something better to do.”

I remember when I first got here, Mrs. Bush told me about a student’s reaction to the way that I was doing Chapel. The student said that it was really slow. The student didn’t necessarily mean that as a compliment, but I think that it represents a lot of what I’ve tried to accomplish with our Chapel program. We may not ever chant the Psalms slowly, with great pauses, but I hope we consider Chapel as a place and a time to slow down, to pause, to breathe, and to consider that we don’t have something better to do, we don’t have somewhere better to be, we simply are, in the presence of God and each other. We simply are.