O Gaia:  Nature and the Poetic Intuition by Bro. David Steindl-Rast O.S.B.

Looking at things from a distance sometimes makes us see the essential features more clearly.  

Few people know that Benedictine monks do not make vows of poverty, celibacy and obedience. They do vow obedience. That is correct. But their other two vows are conversatio morum and stabilitas loci. The first of these obliges the monk to an ever continued conversion, an ever repeated renewal of his life, an unceasing yielding to the formative power of monastic living. Thus, poverty and celibacy are here implied. Stabilitas loci (literally: “stability of place” or “local stability”) is a vow which offers a timely starting point for tackling our topic and the question it poses. Our answer will have bite if we avoid generalities. This will be easiest if we start from a clearcut point of view. You will allow me, as a Benedictine monk, to make this uniquely Benedictine vow my starting point, even though my friends tease me about having stretched Local Stability, in my travels, to distant parts of the earth. Well, looking at things from a distance sometimes makes us see the essential features more clearly. 

What, then, is the meaning of Local Stability?  Its central concern is with being truly present where we are.  This concern is common to monastic traditions throughout the world.  Most of us tend to be present with only a small portion of ourselves.  A larger portion may still be clinging to the past and with another part we may be ahead of ourselves, impatiently reaching out for the future.  But, since the only moment for action is now, spiritual training implies an effort to be present here now.  Surprisingly, this goal can be achieved by methods that seem to contradict each other.  Their extreme forms would be always travelling.  Historical forms reach from extreme to extreme.  Christian tradition knows St. Brendan the Seafarer and other Irish monks, who were vowed to continuous travels, abandoning themselves in small boats to the currents of the sea.  And over against them stands St. Simeon the Stylite, who spent thirty years atop a pillar.  Between these two extremes are many different degrees of cutting loose and of taking roots, all of them aiming at the same result: to make the monk fully present wherever he is.         

In St. Benedict’s 6th century Italy, the wandering monks had become a bit decadent.  St. Benedict speaks of their restless round of monasteries.  They stayed three or four days in each, and in his wording there is just the slightest hint to suggest that the length of their stay depended on how well they liked the food.  (For our own monastery-hoppers today, the travel section of the New York Times offered, not long ago, helpful hints complete with clues to the menu.)  By introducing Local Stability, St. Benedict went far beyond correcting monastic abuses.  This new vow had unforseeable consequences.  It turned out to be literally epoch-making.  It turned Benedictine monasteries into stabilizing centers in Western society, and the epoch in which this took place is sometimes called the Benedictine centuries (8th-12th).         

When one becomes a Benedictine monk, one joins a particular monastery and belongs to it, normally, for the rest of one’s life.  In contrast to other orders in the Church, the Order of St. Benedict is simply a confederation of autonomous monasteries.  In some monasteries the vow of Local Stability is interpreted in a strictly residential sense.  In others it is seen to allow for travels, under obedience.  Always, however, this vow roots the monk for life in one specific place, in one particular community.  And that local community extends to the angels (or nature spirits), the neighbors, the animals and plants of that area.  This is where the relevance of Benedictine stability for our environmental concerns comes into view.

What threatens our times is not mobility, but uprootedness.   

The Dark Ages of Europe were a time of utter uprootedness.  In this they resembled our own times more than any other period in history.  When we read an account like Christopher Dawson’s The Making of Europe, this resemblance may come as a shock.  At a closer look, however, we discern also a force of renewal during that period, which could renew our own culture: Local Stability.  Its opposite is not mobility, as we might think, but uprootedness.  This distinction between mobility and uprootedness is of importance.  Mobility is not an evil, but a high achievement.  To be able to travel easily, quickly, and safely is a great benefit.  We can cultivate this good without being swept away by it.  What threatens our times is not mobility, but uprootedness.         

The roots that kept the Dark Ages from being swept away in a tide of violence were the roots of monastic stability.  Monasteries, too, were vandalized and burnt to the ground again and again.  But again and again they would be rebuilt in the same spirit and – a most important fact – in the same place.  The monks replanted their orchards, restored their mills, and remembered local lore.  That was decisive.  It gave cult, culture, and agriculture the necessary anchorage.  There is no reason why monasteries cannot play a similar role today.  Some do.  Families that were attached to our monastery, but had to move, will sometimes come back year after year, even clear across the continent.  Their only real home is with us.  Monks must rise to that responsibility.  But that won’t be enough.  Millions will have to rise to their responsibility, commit themselves, and take roots again locally.  What agonies of decision this can cause for parents who have to choose between economic advancement linked to a transfer and their children’s needs for local stability.         

Children do have that need.  Some qualities of the human psyche will simply never develop unless one grows up in a stable family – one that is stable also in a local sense.  We speak of growing up.  Why do we never speak of “growing down”?  Because roots don’t matter to us.  They are just that dirty mess that is inevitably attached down below to what we really admire.  But when we put an avocado pit in water to let in sprout, we notice that it grows down before it grows up.  And for a long time so.  Not until the roots are well developed do the first leaves appear.  This is nature’s way.  It is ingrained in us humans, too.  But children are incredibly adaptable.  If they have to change schools every other year, they will adjust.  They will get used somehow to making new friends, again and again, if they must.  It will leave scars.  But they will compensate for the loss.  Children of army personnel and of parents in the diplomatic service are sometimes good examples for this.  We humans can weather many abuses.  Our natural environment, however, must pay the price.

» next page