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X-WR-CALDESC:There are clearly four kinds of monastics. First\, there ar
e the cenobites\, that is to say\, those who belong to a monastery\, where
they serve under a rule and an abbot or prioress.\n\nIn this chapter\
, Benedict describes each of the four main classes of religious life that
were common at the time of his writing. The effects of the descriptions an
d definitions are apparent. He is for all intents and purposes telling us
the characteristics that he values most in spiritual development and empha
sizing the qualities which in his opinion are most important to spiritual
growth.\n\nIn one brief sentence\, then\, Benedict describes the life of t
he cenobite. Cenobites are the seekers of the spiritual life who live in a
monastery--live with others--and are not a law unto themselves. Holiness\
, he argues\, is not something that happens in a vacuum. It has something
to do with the way we live our community lives and our family lives and ou
r public lives as well as the way we say our prayers. The life needs of ot
her people affect the life of the truly spiritual person and they hear the
voice of God in that.\n\nCenobites\, too\, live 'under a Rule.' Meaningle
ss spiritual exercises may not be a Benedictine trait but arbitrariness or
whim are not part of Benedict's prescription for holiness either. Monasti
c spirituality depends on direction. It is a rule of life. Self-control\,
purpose and discipline give aim to what might otherwise deteriorate into a
kind of pseudo-religious life meant more for public show than for persona
l growth. It is so comforting to multiply the practices of the church in o
ur life and so inconvenient to have to meet the responsibilities of the co
mmunities in which we live.\n\nBut the spiritual life is not a taste for s
piritual consolations. The spiritual life is a commitment to faith where w
e would prefer certainty. It depends on readiness. It demands constancy. I
t flourishes in awareness. The ancients say that once upon a time a discip
le asked the elder\,\n\n'Holy One\, is there anything I can do to make mys
elf Enlightened?'\n\nAnd the Holy One answered\, 'As little as you can do
to make the sun rise in the morning.'\n\n'Then of what use\,' the surprise
d disciple asked\, 'are the spiritual exercises you prescribe?'\n\n'To mak
e sure\,' the elder said\, 'that you are not asleep when the sun begins to
rise.'\n\nThe Rule prescribes directions that will keep us\, like the myt
hical disciple\, awake until what we live\, lives in us.\n\nThen\, Benedic
t says\, the cenobite lives under an abbot or prioress\, someone who will
mediate past and future for us\, call us to see where we have come from an
d where we are going\, confront us with the call to the demands of living
fully in the now when we might be most likely to abandon our own best idea
ls for the sake of the easy and the selfish. It is a basic Christian call.
Everyone in life lives under someone and something. Adulthood is not a ma
tter of becoming completely independent of the people who lay claim to our
lives. Adulthood is a matter of being completely open to the insights tha
t come to us from our superiors and our spouses\, our children and our fri
ends\, so that we can become more than we can even begin to imagine for ou
rselves.\n\nThe cenobite\, like most of the people of the world\, works ou
t the way to God by walking with others. In monastic spirituality\, there
is no escape from life\, only a chance to confront it\, day after day in a
ll its sanctifying tedium and blessed boredom and glorious agitation in th
e communities of which we are a part at any given moment of our lives.\n\n
Second\, there are the anchorites or hermits\, who have come through th
e test of living in a monastery for a long time\, and have passed beyond t
he first fervor of monastic life. Thanks to the help and guidance of many\
, they are now trained to fight against evil. They have built up their str
ength and go from the battle line in the ranks of their members to the sin
gle combat of the desert. Self-reliant now\, without the support of anothe
r\, they are ready with God's help to grapple single-handed with the vices
of body and mind.\n\nIf any paragraph in the Rule dispels the popular
notion of spirituality\, surely this is it. Modern society has the idea t
hat if you want to live a truly spiritual life\, you have to leave life as
we know it and go away by yourself and 'contemplate\,' and that if you do
\, you will get holy. It is a fascinating although misleading thought. The
Rule of Benedict says that if you want to be holy\, stay where you are in
the human community and learn from it. Learn patience. Learn wisdom. Lear
n unselfishness. Learn love. Then\, if you want to go away from it all\, t
hen and only then will you be ready to do it alone.\n\nThere is\, of cours
e\, an anchorite lurking in each of us who wants to get away from it all\,
who finds the tasks of dailiness devastating\, who look for God in clouds
and candlelight. Perhaps the most powerful point of this paragraph is tha
t it was written by someone who had himself set out to live the spiritual
life as a hermit and then discovered\, apparently\, that living life alone
is nowhere near as searing of our souls as living it with others. It is o
ne thing to plan my own day well with all its balance and its quiet and it
s contemplative exercises. It is entirely another rank of holiness to let
my children and my superiors and my elderly parents and the needs of the p
oor do it for me.\n\nThird\, there are sarabaites\, the most detestable
kind of monastics\, who with no experience to guide them\, no rule to try
them as 'gold is tried in a furnace (Prv 27:21)\,' have a character as so
ft as lead. Still loyal to the world by their actions\, they clearly lie t
o God by their signs of religion. Two or three together\, or even alone\,
without a shepherd\, they pen themselves up in their own sheepfolds\, not
God's. Their law is what they like to do\, whatever strikes their fancy. A
nything they believe in and choose\, they call holy\; anything they dislik
e\, they consider forbidden.\n\nThere's passion in the Rule of Benedic
t\, lots of it\, and sarabaites come in for good share. Benedict calls thi
s sort of 'spirituality' detestable.\n\nAnchorites separate themselves fro
m a community in order to concentrate their energies and strengthen their
virtues apart from the distractions of everyday life. They are seasoned se
ekers who want to center their lives in God alone\, naively perhaps but si
ncerely nevertheless.\n\nSarabaites separated themselves also. Before the
codification of religious law\, people could assume a habit without formal
training or approval. Sarabaites presented themselves as religious but se
parated themselves from a disciplined life and spiritual guidance and seri
ous purpose in order to concentrate their energies on themselves. They cal
led themselves religious but they were the worst of all things religious.
They were unauthentic. They pretended to be what they were not.\n\nThey li
ved lives of moderate commitment\, chaste and even simple to a point\, but
they listened to no one's wisdom but their\n\nPerhaps the real importance
of the paragraph for today is to remind ourselves that it's not all that
uncommon for people of all eras to use religion to make themselves comfort
able. It is a sense of personal goodness that they want\, not a sense of g
ospel challenge. They are tired of being challenged. They want some proof
that they've arrived at a spiritual height that gives consolation in this
life and the promise of security in the next. There comes a time in life f
or everyone where the effort of it all begins to seem too much\, when the
temptation to settle down and nestle in becomes reasonable.\n\nAfter years
of trying to achieve a degree of spiritual depth with little result\, aft
er a lifetime of uphill efforts with little to show for it\, the lure is t
o let it be\, to stop where we are\, to coast. We begin to make peace with
tepidity. We begin to do what it takes to get by but little that it takes
to get on with the spiritual life. We do the exercises but we cease to 'l
isten with the heart.' We do the externals--the churchgoing and churchgivi
ng--and we call ourselves religious\, but we have long since failed to car
e. A sense of self-sacrifice dies in us and we obey only the desires and t
he demands within us.\n\nFourth and finally\, there are the monastics c
alled gyrovagues\, who spend their entire lives drifting from region to re
gion\, staying as guests for three or four days in different monasteries.
Always on the move\, they never settle down\, and are slaves to their own
wills and gross appetites. In every way they are worse than sarabaites.\n
\nIt is better to keep silent than to speak of all these and their disgrac
eful way of life. Let us pass them by\, then\, and with the help of God\,
proceed to draw up a plan for the strong kind\, the cenobites.\n\nThe
gyrovagues\, whom Benedict rejected out of hand\, actually had a noble beg
inning. Founded to follow the Christ 'who had nowhere to lay his head\,' t
he earliest gyrovagi threw themselves on the providence of God\, having no
thing\, owning nothing\, amassing nothing. Originally\, therefore\, a sign
of faith and simplicity to the Christian community\, gyrovagi soon became
a sign of indolence and dissipation.\n\nGyrovagues went from community to
community\, living off the charity of working monks\, begging from the pe
ople\, dependent on the almsgiving of others. But they never stayed anypla
ce long enough to do any work themselves or to be called to accountability
by the community. As admirable as their call to total poverty may have be
en in the beginning\, it began to be their own particular brand of self-ce
nteredness. They took from every group they visited but they gave little o
r nothing back to the communities or families that supported them. Gyrovag
ues abound in religious groups: they talk high virtue and demand it from e
verybody but themselves. They know how to shop for a parish but they do li
ttle to build one. They live off a community but they are never available
when the work of maintaining it is necessary. They are committed to morali
ty in the curriculum of grade schools but completely unmoved by the lack o
f morality in government ethics. Gyrovagues were an extreme and undiscipli
ned kind of monastic and Benedict decried them\, not so much because of th
eir ideals surely as because of their lack of direction and good work.\n\n
Benedict's reference to the gyrovagues teaches a good lesson yet today. Ex
tremes in anything\, he implies\, even in religion\, are dangerous. When w
e go to excess in one dimension of life\, the unbalance in something else
destroys us. Work\, for instance\, is good but not at the expense of famil
y. Love is good but not at the expense of work.\n\nToo much of a good thin
g can creep into life very easily and become our rationalization for avoid
ing everything else. Achievement becomes more important than family. Praye
r becomes more important than work. Religious exercises become more import
ant than personal responsibilities. There is a little gyrovague in us all.
\n\nThe Tao Te Ching\, the Chinese Book of the Way\, an ancient manual on
the art of living that is the most widely translated book in world literat
ure after the Bible\, says on the same subject:\n\nFill your bowl to the b
rim\nand it will spill.\nKeep sharpening your knife\nand it will blunt.\nC
hase after money and security\nand your heart will never unclench.\nCare a
bout people's approval\nand you will be their prisoner.\nDo your work\, th
en step back.\nThe only path to serenity.
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DTSTAMP:20260405T134027Z
DESCRIPTION:There are clearly four kinds of monastics. First\, there are
the cenobites\, that is to say\, those who belong to a monastery\, where
they serve under a rule and an abbot or prioress.\n\nIn this chapter\,
Benedict describes each of the four main classes of religious life that w
ere common at the time of his writing. The effects of the descriptions and
definitions are apparent. He is for all intents and purposes telling us t
he characteristics that he values most in spiritual development and emphas
izing the qualities which in his opinion are most important to spiritual g
rowth.\n\nIn one brief sentence\, then\, Benedict describes the life of th
e cenobite. Cenobites are the seekers of the spiritual life who live in a
monastery--live with others--and are not a law unto themselves. Holiness\,
he argues\, is not something that happens in a vacuum. It has something t
o do with the way we live our community lives and our family lives and our
public lives as well as the way we say our prayers. The life needs of oth
er people affect the life of the truly spiritual person and they hear the
voice of God in that.\n\nCenobites\, too\, live 'under a Rule.' Meaningles
s spiritual exercises may not be a Benedictine trait but arbitrariness or
whim are not part of Benedict's prescription for holiness either. Monastic
spirituality depends on direction. It is a rule of life. Self-control\, p
urpose and discipline give aim to what might otherwise deteriorate into a
kind of pseudo-religious life meant more for public show than for personal
growth. It is so comforting to multiply the practices of the church in ou
r life and so inconvenient to have to meet the responsibilities of the com
munities in which we live.\n\nBut the spiritual life is not a taste for sp
iritual consolations. The spiritual life is a commitment to faith where we
would prefer certainty. It depends on readiness. It demands constancy. It
flourishes in awareness. The ancients say that once upon a time a discipl
e asked the elder\,\n\n'Holy One\, is there anything I can do to make myse
lf Enlightened?'\n\nAnd the Holy One answered\, 'As little as you can do t
o make the sun rise in the morning.'\n\n'Then of what use\,' the surprised
disciple asked\, 'are the spiritual exercises you prescribe?'\n\n'To make
sure\,' the elder said\, 'that you are not asleep when the sun begins to
rise.'\n\nThe Rule prescribes directions that will keep us\, like the myth
ical disciple\, awake until what we live\, lives in us.\n\nThen\, Benedict
says\, the cenobite lives under an abbot or prioress\, someone who will m
ediate past and future for us\, call us to see where we have come from and
where we are going\, confront us with the call to the demands of living f
ully in the now when we might be most likely to abandon our own best ideal
s for the sake of the easy and the selfish. It is a basic Christian call.
Everyone in life lives under someone and something. Adulthood is not a mat
ter of becoming completely independent of the people who lay claim to our
lives. Adulthood is a matter of being completely open to the insights that
come to us from our superiors and our spouses\, our children and our frie
nds\, so that we can become more than we can even begin to imagine for our
selves.\n\nThe cenobite\, like most of the people of the world\, works out
the way to God by walking with others. In monastic spirituality\, there i
s no escape from life\, only a chance to confront it\, day after day in al
l its sanctifying tedium and blessed boredom and glorious agitation in the
communities of which we are a part at any given moment of our lives.\n\n<
i>Second\, there are the anchorites or hermits\, who have come through the
test of living in a monastery for a long time\, and have passed beyond th
e first fervor of monastic life. Thanks to the help and guidance of many\,
they are now trained to fight against evil. They have built up their stre
ngth and go from the battle line in the ranks of their members to the sing
le combat of the desert. Self-reliant now\, without the support of another
\, they are ready with God's help to grapple single-handed with the vices
of body and mind.\n\nIf any paragraph in the Rule dispels the popular
notion of spirituality\, surely this is it. Modern society has the idea th
at if you want to live a truly spiritual life\, you have to leave life as
we know it and go away by yourself and 'contemplate\,' and that if you do\
, you will get holy. It is a fascinating although misleading thought. The
Rule of Benedict says that if you want to be holy\, stay where you are in
the human community and learn from it. Learn patience. Learn wisdom. Learn
unselfishness. Learn love. Then\, if you want to go away from it all\, th
en and only then will you be ready to do it alone.\n\nThere is\, of course
\, an anchorite lurking in each of us who wants to get away from it all\,
who finds the tasks of dailiness devastating\, who look for God in clouds
and candlelight. Perhaps the most powerful point of this paragraph is that
it was written by someone who had himself set out to live the spiritual l
ife as a hermit and then discovered\, apparently\, that living life alone
is nowhere near as searing of our souls as living it with others. It is on
e thing to plan my own day well with all its balance and its quiet and its
contemplative exercises. It is entirely another rank of holiness to let m
y children and my superiors and my elderly parents and the needs of the po
or do it for me.\n\nThird\, there are sarabaites\, the most detestable
kind of monastics\, who with no experience to guide them\, no rule to try
them as 'gold is tried in a furnace (Prv 27:21)\,' have a character as sof
t as lead. Still loyal to the world by their actions\, they clearly lie to
God by their signs of religion. Two or three together\, or even alone\, w
ithout a shepherd\, they pen themselves up in their own sheepfolds\, not G
od's. Their law is what they like to do\, whatever strikes their fancy. An
ything they believe in and choose\, they call holy\; anything they dislike
\, they consider forbidden.\n\nThere's passion in the Rule of Benedict
\, lots of it\, and sarabaites come in for good share. Benedict calls this
sort of 'spirituality' detestable.\n\nAnchorites separate themselves from
a community in order to concentrate their energies and strengthen their v
irtues apart from the distractions of everyday life. They are seasoned see
kers who want to center their lives in God alone\, naively perhaps but sin
cerely nevertheless.\n\nSarabaites separated themselves also. Before the c
odification of religious law\, people could assume a habit without formal
training or approval. Sarabaites presented themselves as religious but sep
arated themselves from a disciplined life and spiritual guidance and serio
us purpose in order to concentrate their energies on themselves. They call
ed themselves religious but they were the worst of all things religious. T
hey were unauthentic. They pretended to be what they were not.\n\nThey liv
ed lives of moderate commitment\, chaste and even simple to a point\, but
they listened to no one's wisdom but their\n\nPerhaps the real importance
of the paragraph for today is to remind ourselves that it's not all that u
ncommon for people of all eras to use religion to make themselves comforta
ble. It is a sense of personal goodness that they want\, not a sense of go
spel challenge. They are tired of being challenged. They want some proof t
hat they've arrived at a spiritual height that gives consolation in this l
ife and the promise of security in the next. There comes a time in life fo
r everyone where the effort of it all begins to seem too much\, when the t
emptation to settle down and nestle in becomes reasonable.\n\nAfter years
of trying to achieve a degree of spiritual depth with little result\, afte
r a lifetime of uphill efforts with little to show for it\, the lure is to
let it be\, to stop where we are\, to coast. We begin to make peace with
tepidity. We begin to do what it takes to get by but little that it takes
to get on with the spiritual life. We do the exercises but we cease to 'li
sten with the heart.' We do the externals--the churchgoing and churchgivin
g--and we call ourselves religious\, but we have long since failed to care
. A sense of self-sacrifice dies in us and we obey only the desires and th
e demands within us.\n\nFourth and finally\, there are the monastics ca
lled gyrovagues\, who spend their entire lives drifting from region to reg
ion\, staying as guests for three or four days in different monasteries. A
lways on the move\, they never settle down\, and are slaves to their own w
ills and gross appetites. In every way they are worse than sarabaites.\n\n
It is better to keep silent than to speak of all these and their disgracef
ul way of life. Let us pass them by\, then\, and with the help of God\, pr
oceed to draw up a plan for the strong kind\, the cenobites.\n\nThe gy
rovagues\, whom Benedict rejected out of hand\, actually had a noble begin
ning. Founded to follow the Christ 'who had nowhere to lay his head\,' the
earliest gyrovagi threw themselves on the providence of God\, having noth
ing\, owning nothing\, amassing nothing. Originally\, therefore\, a sign o
f faith and simplicity to the Christian community\, gyrovagi soon became a
sign of indolence and dissipation.\n\nGyrovagues went from community to c
ommunity\, living off the charity of working monks\, begging from the peop
le\, dependent on the almsgiving of others. But they never stayed anyplace
long enough to do any work themselves or to be called to accountability b
y the community. As admirable as their call to total poverty may have been
in the beginning\, it began to be their own particular brand of self-cent
eredness. They took from every group they visited but they gave little or
nothing back to the communities or families that supported them. Gyrovague
s abound in religious groups: they talk high virtue and demand it from eve
rybody but themselves. They know how to shop for a parish but they do litt
le to build one. They live off a community but they are never available wh
en the work of maintaining it is necessary. They are committed to morality
in the curriculum of grade schools but completely unmoved by the lack of
morality in government ethics. Gyrovagues were an extreme and undiscipline
d kind of monastic and Benedict decried them\, not so much because of thei
r ideals surely as because of their lack of direction and good work.\n\nBe
nedict's reference to the gyrovagues teaches a good lesson yet today. Extr
emes in anything\, he implies\, even in religion\, are dangerous. When we
go to excess in one dimension of life\, the unbalance in something else de
stroys us. Work\, for instance\, is good but not at the expense of family.
Love is good but not at the expense of work.\n\nToo much of a good thing
can creep into life very easily and become our rationalization for avoidin
g everything else. Achievement becomes more important than family. Prayer
becomes more important than work. Religious exercises become more importan
t than personal responsibilities. There is a little gyrovague in us all.\n
\nThe Tao Te Ching\, the Chinese Book of the Way\, an ancient manual on th
e art of living that is the most widely translated book in world literatur
e after the Bible\, says on the same subject:\n\nFill your bowl to the bri
m\nand it will spill.\nKeep sharpening your knife\nand it will blunt.\nCha
se after money and security\nand your heart will never unclench.\nCare abo
ut people's approval\nand you will be their prisoner.\nDo your work\, then
step back.\nThe only path to serenity.
DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20250908T000000
DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20250908T235900
LOCATION:Chapter 1
SUMMARY:The Kinds of Monastics
END:VEVENT
END:VCALENDAR