While a common piece of monastic lore goes like this: “What do you do in the monastery?” the seeker asked the monk. “Oh, we fall down, and we get up, we fall down, and we get up.” Now, the monk was attempting to explain an aspect of humility, a core tenet of monastic life. We mess up, we acknowledge it, we experience forgiveness, and we get up and we go on. Until the next time.
Another core tenet of monastic life is balance—which can also be seen in a figurative as well as the literal sense. When we are balanced, we fall less, whether we are talking about physical falling or shortfalls in thought or action.
More than 20 sisters who have spent a lifetime striving for a life of humility and balance according to the Rule of Benedict recently spent a morning focused on actual balance in an effort to lessen the possibility of actual falls. Physical therapist Jamie Mattswell of Fyzical Therapy & Balance Centers presented the mechanics of how our bodies maintain physical balance, an issue as we age. She then offered suggestions for recognizing warning signs that something in the body is off kilter and how to best remedy it to prevent falls and accidents.
“There are multiple systems that must work together to help us maintain balance,” she explained. “When one of them isn’t functioning or connecting with the other systems, you may experience vertigo or imbalance that can cause you to stumble and fall.”
In an intergenerational monastic community like the one at Mount St. Benedict Monastery, such opportunities as the workshop on improving balance and preventing falls for the older sisters is “balanced” by the efforts of the younger members to learn from their elders the habits that lead to increased life balance and humility according to the Rule of Benedict. Everyone is supporting each other in seeking to avoid the imbalance that causes them to stumble and fall. That is a gift of monastic community as each tries to be the first to honor the other, following Benedict's instruction in Chapter 72.
