Katie Gordon recently presented on a panel at the Federation (now Monastic Congregation) of St. Gertrude General Chapter in Beech Grove, Indiana. Gordon, who lives with the Erie Benedictine community at Pax Priory, and works with Monasteries of the Heart, presented alongside “seasoned monastic” Teresa Jackson, OSB (Cottonwood, ID), “younger monastic” Kathleen Marie Cash, OSB (Ferdinand, IN), and Jane Somerton, OblSB (Cottonwood, ID).
Each panelist offered insights on their experience of, and hopes for, monastic tradition today. Much of the conversation pointed to innovations and new experiments within Benedictine communities. Gordon discussed Monasteries of the Heart as an online monastery linking seekers to tradition and each other in a new way. Somerton and Jackson shared multiple projects happening in Cottonwood, particularly the shared Oblate leadership team and the “Benedictine Cohousing Companions” live-in monastic model. Cash shared how she shares the values and practices of Benedictine tradition with the students and teachers in the school where she teaches math.
Questions that came up included: how can we—as individuals and communities—recognize and move through our fears so that we might open up to new possibilities? Are we, as monks and seekers in our tradition, committed to standing by the institution of the Catholic Church, or to standing by our monastic values of hospitality and love? Who can we invite to be a part of our community dialogues as we discern the futures of our buildings, our liturgies, and our tradition?
Gordon offered insight from Black theologian Howard Thurman who she says speaks to this moment in religious and spiritual life today. In his autobiography, he writes that while we need a structure or mold in order to relate to a movement of the spirit, the work of the spirit is to break out of that mold anew. We then, again, create a mold to contain spirit, but the spirit breaks out again anew (full quote below). Gordon stated that she believes that spirit is trying to break out of our current structures of religious life and monastic tradition, yet many of us are trying to keep spirit contained within the safe molds we’ve created for them today. It would be a loss for us all, she says, if we don’t let spirit break out anew and lead the way into the next expression of the Benedictine tradition.
Howard Thurman on Spirit and Structure:
“Here again I learned an old lesson, with new implications: how difficult it is to trust the genius of an idea or a movement to grow and to perpetuate itself without finally feeling the necessity to formalize itself in some way. … There is an intrinsic contradiction between the freedom of the spirit and the organization through which that freedom manifests itself. … It too must be structured and contained within a mold. The only function of the mold is to give substance to the spirit, that we might relate to it as we do to other competing obligations when the pressures build within us to make a choice. But when, inevitably, the mold begins to choke the spirit, the mold is broken and the spirit breaks out anew, only to encrust itself in another mold, and so the process continues. This has been the historical pattern of religion and indeed all of society’s creative expressions.” (181, With Head and Heart: The Autobiography of Howard Thurman, 1979)
