Hannah LeGrand has a review of Kyle David Bennet’s Practices of Love in Comment Magazine which is worth reading. I’ve posted before on the romanticisation of monasticism. Both those who romanticise and criticise the monastic life tend to have a misconception of it being a retreat from community into isolation. As LeGrand writes:
There is a common misconception of the monastic life, that it was an escape from human society, a retreat into a solitary life and the personal cultivation of one’s relationship with God. The monk, we tend to think, was turned inward and upward, a strange and almost mystical figure—barely of this world.
The reality of the monastic life, however, was often quite different. Indeed, far from being plagued by an excess of solitude, the aspect of medieval monasticism that would most likely horrify modern sensibilities is the oppressive lack of privacy many cloisters afforded. Monks slept together in one open dormitory. They worshiped together, ate together, and worked together. The monk or nun who committed their life to God was rarely afforded the luxury of being alone with God.
As Bennett notes, “Monks and nuns make vows not to a cloister but to a community. And they do so not to escape the world but to enact a different one.” The monastery was not a rejection of community. Rather, it represented a commitment to enacting a new sort of community, one in which all members strove, with the help of the spiritual disciplines, to not only love the Lord their God with all their hearts, souls, and minds but also to truly love their neighbours as themselves in all the patterns of their working and resting, their sleeping and rising, their meals, chores, and worship. It is to this end that the spiritual disciplines were employed.
LeGrand discusses contemporary “self care”, into which this romanticised view of monasticism can be fitted. She is endearingly self-deprecating about her own attempts at “spiritual practice” and how this was a form of spiritual pride:
As a high school student, I went through a brief and rather misguided period of fascination with the spiritual disciplines. In practice, my discipline of choice was most often that of silence. Being naturally a quiet sort of student, holding my tongue was no great burden to me, and as I fancied myself following in the footsteps of ancient Christians, my shyness and tendency to retreat inside myself seemed to take on a weighty and pleasing spiritual significance.
Thinking back on this high school practice while reading Kyle Bennett’s Practices of Love: Spiritual Disciplines for the Life of the World, I realized with an embarrassed sort of horror that throughout all those stretches of pious silence I had never really paid any special attention to listening. If anything, the weightiness of my own discipline cultivated a disdain for the shallow conversation around me, and I’m sure I barely paid attention to the day’s petty lessons on differential equations and the Meech Lake Accord that had, no doubt, been carefully prepared. In this way, I think it is safe to say that I was doing the spiritual disciplines wrong.
Bennet’s book looks like it will join my ever-burgeoning to-read list – it sounds like a bracingly practical approach to what can often be an over romanticised practice.
Indeed, Bennett does not spend much time on grand ideas or theological arguments. Practices of Love reads—in some ways much like the original recommendations of Cassian himself—as a practical manual on the spiritual disciplines in modern life, full of concrete habits to incline every waking hour toward love of one’s neighbour. His suggestions are often unexciting, sometimes downright intrusive, and, in their own way, radical. He recommends inviting neighbours to join in our precious Sabbath rest even when all we want is a long nap and a movie. He recommends setting aside time to think positively about that co‐worker we really can’t stand, and using our own silence as an opportunity to listen very carefully to even shallow conversation.
In this way, Bennett’s take on the spiritual disciplines offers us none of the seductive charm of a minimalist wardrobe. Rather, in true monastic spirit, there is only the strange and uncomfortable, day in and day out enactment of a new sort of community, one in which love for one’s neighbour is not just a beautiful idea or even a political position, but something sunk deep into muscle memory, something that fills even the in‐between moments of ordinary days.
One of the many things I have enjoyed about Peter Reason’s In Search of Grace is a certain honesty about the curmudgeonliness that can go with the pilgrim spirit (especially in the modern world, where pilgrimage is more of a Great Event than the norm of previous times)
Séamus Sweeney 