Stability

Poverty, chastity, obedience – these are the three central vows and virtues of classic monasticism. There is provocative living going on today under the heading of the “New Monasticism.” The Christian intentional communities forming under the heading of the New Monasticism have virtues and vows of their own.

These new Christian monastic communities are interesting, as are their vows.  A recent Sojourners article, “12 Marks of a New Monasticism,” has this as the #1 sign of the presence of a new monasticism community: Relocation to the abandoned places of Empire. Every part of that brief imperative strikes some who have heard it as extraterrestrial as a vow they might take, or even understand.

While this new work is going on, full of possibility, we might reconsider the classic vows of the “old monasticism,” particularly the fourth, which doesn’t make the top three list above, but was introduced by Benedict. Benedict thought stability was important, right after poverty, obedience and chasity.

Our own context: unparalleled mobility in terms of the modes of transportation available, the rapidity of job changes, address changes, etc. may mean that stability is more important now than it ever has been.

There are three spheres in which we can look at stability: the local community (like a local church community, or a food co-op); the intrapersonal community, that is the levels of our own individual consciousness; and stability in the global context.

Stability is about unleashing the energies of transformation, available only through enduring relationships (Augustine Roberts, Centered on Christ).

So, within ourselves, there are selves. There are internalized parents, lovers, siblings, rivals, and friends. Also, we have inside us archetypal figures, more shadowy to our consciousness. I have looked into the presence within me of the feminine divine, the hermit, and the twins, for instance. The virtue of stability raises the question of how we relate to our inner selves; do we ignore their presence, curse them, idolize them, or see them as conversational friends.

With respect to the level of the local community, here we’re talking about not fleeing from conflict in a community, about staying with a community rather than flying off to be part of a “better” one. Under the learning that come with understanding our projections, what my friend calls, “You spot it you got it,” the very people who make us the angriest, or frighten us the most are the instruments of our transformation. We need to be stable to let the saving grace work through its paradoxical paths.

But for me, the newest way to think about stability is at the global level. Some time ago we learned that there is no “away” to which we can throw things. We learned this, apparently, as a beginning understanding, not something thorough-going, as we continue to dispose of things at an unbelievable rate. For instance, in the U.S. we throw away, not recycle, 40,000,000 plastic water bottles each day.

In religious language, there are no more “ends of the earth,” there is one earth, and we must not only “think globally and act locally,” the green slogan of the 80s, but we must think and act both globally and locally. But what could it mean for me to be cultivating the virtue of stability at the global level?

For the Episcopal Church a beginning suggestion is to use the vehicle of companion diocese relationships, marked by mutual relationships, by the “round dance of the Trinity,” as ways to build up our sense of how to live fully where we are, locally, and yet to have in our hearts the connection to at least one other part of the world as being our home too. To live in these companion relationships without taking offense, being afraid, without acting from within white privilege, and finally, without giving up on the relationships, all this will require the virtue of stability to be something for which we pray.

As we move into a new era of Christianity, and indeed a new global consciousness in which Christianity will take new a life-giving shape, it may be important for us to look not only at the new, such as the New Monasticism, but also at how the re-invigorated forms from our tradition, including the existing orders of religious, and also the core monastic virtues of poverty, chastity, obedience, and stability can contribute to the spread of Good News today.