Become What You Are by Bro. David Steindl-Rast O.S.B.

The sun rises and the bell rings, and you are to be there: Your impatience can’t make it happen before the right time; your attachment to staying in bed can’t delay it; and you’ll miss it if you’re up but not really present, alert, attentive.

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JL:   When I was thinking about the theme of holy warfare, it occurred to me that there are military virtues — such as discipline, strength, courage, resolve, fidelity, and so on — which are also vital to spiritual growth. And especially the aspect of discipline, involving training and regular practice. What are the disciplines that have been developed that can be used against these devils today?

BD:   The word discipline is very significant in this context, since it is not primarily a military term. The corresponding military term is regimentation. Discipline is a school term: the discipulus is the disciple, the pupil. Even the word pupil is apt here, because it is related to the pupil in our eye, the pupilla — the little doll, the little image of oneself that one sees in another’s eye. This eye-to-eye contact is the essence of discipline: discipline is the attitude that you have when you see eye-to-eye with your teacher. Today especially people reject external regimentation, and are looking for a teacher that gives discipline eye-to-eye. The drill sergeant doesn’t care if you are eye-to-eye with him or anybody else, just that you do what you are told. But discipline involves bringing out what is already within you. That’s what the true teacher does. And the other virtues you mentioned have similar parallels. Fortitude or courage, for instance, is simply the resolve to overcome obstacles. Spiritual warfare involves the acquiring and implementation of the strengths and virtues needed to overcome obstacles.

JL:   Discipline suggests to me habits of behavior and regular practices that the teacher would presumably teach. How does this dimension relate to overcoming anger, lust, laziness?

BD:   Within the monastery, which is my background and the essential environment that I feel comfortable with and know well, there is a particularly highly developed tradition of such training. In fact, the monastery can be understood precisely as a setting in which this discipline is cultivated. It is a place to which people go in order to get themselves together, again in the sense of uniting with themselves, with others, with God.

The two realms in which this discipline is cultivated are space and time, and the aim is that the whole of life should be brought together from alienation to fullness. With regard to time, for instance, there are in monasteries all sorts of bells, gongs, clappers, drums, and so on — all kinds of signals that tell you what it is time for. The struggle is within yourself to overcome your laziness, your attachments, your impatience in order to be truly wherever you need to be at any particular time. T.S. Eliot speaks of “Time, not our time,” and he explicitly says this in relation to the Angelus bell that, in monastic life, rings three times a day — at sunrise, at sunset, and at high noon. The sun doesn’t rise again or wait for you if you oversleep and don’t get up when the bell rings. The sun rises and the bell rings, and you are to be there: Your impatience can’t make it happen before the right time; your attachment to staying in bed can’t delay it; and you’ll miss it if you’re up but not really present, alert, attentive. If this sort of timeliness appeals to you, as it does to me, these signals are not a torturing regimentation but musical invitations, celebrations of particular moments.

The difficult aspect, of course, is the one expressed by St. Benedict in his Rule: “When the bell rings, stop everything. Don’t even cross your t’s or dot your i’s, but go quickly.” The challenge is to learn to respond immediately to whatever it is time for. Not to wonder whether you have time for it or whether you like it, but simply to respond when it is time. And the truth of this discipline is universal. For instance, in Taoism, the flow goes on and you can either be in tune with the flow or not. All these signals are simply means to get you into the flow, and the less you are in tune the more difficult the immediate responding is, the more obstacles you have to overcome to get with it.

With regard to space, the monastery is organized in such a way that there is a place for everything, and relatedly that everything is there, the monastery is self-contained. The ideal is wonderfully expressed in the Benedictine tradition by the famous plan of St. Gall, which is reflected more or less in many medieval monasteries. With everything there and a place for everything, you can be at home in your world, in the place where you belong. And belonging and getting yourself together are closely related. This sufficient world, which St. Benedict calls a workshop for the spiritual life, affords the spaces and the tools for working on yourself, transforming yourself, and in turn the world around you.

Novices always have difficulties with both aspects — time and space. When it is time for something, they often want to do something else; when this is the place to be, they often want to be somewhere else. And isn’t this how it is for most people? The monastery also emphasizes neatness and orderliness; most visitors notice this immediately. There is a close relation between the struggle to put things in order within your self, within your life, and the ordering of the space around you. But novices find this hard to understand. They say, “We came here to learn spiritual matters, and what I’m told to do is how to put my shoes on, when to put them on and take them off, to put them down with the right one on the right side, the left on the left, and parallel, not toed in. What does that have to do with the spiritual life?” It has everything to do with it. That is the spirituality; it isn’t something that you do just as a novice, and then graduate to spirituality. But it takes a long time to see that orderliness and cleanliness is not just cleaning the room but it is getting your life in order.

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