Furthermore, those who receive the name of prioress or abbot are to lead the community by a twofold teaching: they must point out to the monastics all that is good and holy more by example than by words, proposing God's commandments to a receptive community with words, but demonstrating God's instructions to the stubborn and the dull by a living example. Again, if they teach the community that something is not to be done, then neither must they do it, "lest after preaching to others, they themselves be found reprobate (1 Cor 9:27)" and God some day call to them in their sin: "How is it that you repeat my just commands and mouth my covenant when you hate discipline and toss my words behind you (Ps 50: 16-17)?" And also this: "How is it that you can see a splinter in another's eye, and never notice the plank in your own (Mt 7:3)?"

The Tao says,
"We join spokes together in a wheel
but it is the center hole
that makes the wagon move."

Benedict says that those who hold authority in a community are not to be above the group, they are to be the centers of it, the norm of it, the movers of it. They themselves are to mirror its values. Their job is not simply to give orders. Their job is to live out the ideals. It is an authority far removed from office elitism or pompous hierarchy or highhanded parenting.

Benedict calls a community to obedience, yes, but he does not call it to servitude. He does not call people to conformity for the sake of conformity. That's where modern concepts of blind obedience and the monastic concept of cenobitic obedience are so distinct from one another. Blind obedience demands that underlings comply with authority without thought of consequences. Cenobitic obedience insists that equals must bring a thoughtful concern for what is best for everyone before they ask anything of consequence.

Autocrats and militarists and spiritual charlatans and abusive parents and corporate moguls want the people under them to obey laws from which their exalted positions hold them exempt. Benedict says that the only authentic call for obedience comes from those who themselves demonstrate the value of the law.

The point is that what we do not live we do not have a right to require, and that for two reasons: first, because it is a hollow call to insist that others do what we do not do ourselves and secondly, because it requires for the sake of requiring something rather than for the merit of the requirement itself. To hold people under us to a law which we ourselves have no intention of respecting is to make a mockery of what we ask. Employees whom we require to work because we will not; children who are told to avoid what they see us doing with impunity; citizens who must do what they see us declaring exempt for ourselves, do learn from us. They learn that law is useless and that we are frauds and that power protects only the powerful. Benedict is saying that if the laws are good, then people will be able to see that in the lawgiver.

But Benedict is saying even more than this. Benedict is saying that the function of spiritual leadership is not to intimidate people into submission by fear or guilt. The function of spiritual leadership is to show in our own lives the beauty that oozes out of those who live the spiritual life to its fullness. The function of spiritual leadership is to enshrine what a good life can be.

The abbot and prioress are to make of themselves the light that guides and the crystal that rings true. Otherwise, why should anyone else attempt the Way at all. "Love work and hate lordship," the Hasidim teach their rabbis. It is Benedict's teaching, too.