A Place Apart: Monastic Prayer and Practice for Everyone

Rating:
Summary: freedom of discernment
Review: "It is not always easy to discern the will of God in all the details of life. By entrusting our way to a pneumaticos, a spirit-filled abba or amma, we can benefit by the discernment of one who is more under the influence of the Spirit than ourselves. In the later institutionalization of the monastic orders there has been added to this the gift which Christ gave to his Church to guide: 'He who hears you, hears me.'...

"One of the benefits of this obedience is freedom. The monk walking in the way of obedience is freed from having to devote time and energy to discerning God's will in so many of the details of life. He can simply do what he is told and walk with God. This could, of course, be a disguise for laziness or undue dependency. It is only the mature who can truly obey, like Christ. The dependent go with the flow for less than fully human reasons, rather than seek maturely to embrace the will of God. The immature struggling for a sense of self cannot obey, for they fear that in subordinating themselves to another they will lose themselves. Mature persons can submit themselves freely to another without fear of losing themselves. They see obedience, rather, as the way to more surely attain what they want."--M. Basil Pennington, O.C.S.O., A Place Apart (1998), pp. 85-86

I think this passage communicates rather well the idea of "freedom of obedience" that is a monastic and later on religious asceticism effectively proven through centuries of practice. However, I also believe that there are dangers in extending this model of obedience to lay life, of which I will mention only one. One danger lies in the absence of reciprocity. The life of the monk is wholly devoted to the monastery and its spiritual regime. The individual good of the monk is identified with the corporate good, and centuries of experience have proven such a convergence to be generally beneficial. There is reciprocity.

The lay person, on the other hand, has obligations and responsibilities of a sometimes very personal nature that are outside the interests of clerical institutions, and, moreover, clerical institutions assume no responsibility for and often demonstrate no understanding of or sympathy for lay obligations and responsibilities. When clerics ask of lay people obedience of a monastic character, conflict may arise with lay obligations and responsibilities that may lie properly outside the purview of the cleric, and it is deeply misguided in these cases to ask obedience of a monastic nature because the cleric asks the lay person to neglect personal obligations and responsibilities for which the cleric assumes no responsibility. There is no reciprocity. And there is no reciprocity because the lay person is not a cleric or religious.

In these specific cases, the lay person must be accorded not the "freedom of obedience"--which becomes not a key but a prison--but rather the freedom of discernment.

Sometimes the interest of the cleric is entirely self-serving and self-centered, and the cleric does not address the real spiritual needs of the lay person because the cleric is blindly caught up in an unfeeling, impersonal, or unthinking corporate agenda. Obedience engendered by these sentiments is of a destructive character. It is one manifestation of "authoritarian clericalism," which are various. It is "authoritarian" in the properly negative sense because it entails the abuse of the spiritual authority indicated by the clerical state.

"Obedience, the sure way. Blind obedience to your superior."--St. Josemaria Escriva, The Way, 941.

It should be noted that the "blind obedience" that is very much part of the monastic tradition, which derives from the spirit of the Desert Fathers and Mothers and in which it finds its absolutist expression, engenders problems of a spiritual nature when it is extended to lay spirituality. The lay person is not a monk or a cleric, so that the spirit of discerning obedience wisely affirms distinctions that flow from essential differences.

Rating:
Summary: Joining in Spirit With Monks and Nuns
Review: If you missed "A Place Apart" in 1983, you can come to this second edition assured that little has been changed. The publisher encouraged Fr. Pennington to issue this edition with a new introduction and photographs because of the many reader requests for a new copy of the book - their copies had begun falling apart with constant use. In "A Place Apart," Fr. Pennington makes it clear that "the call...to enter into the solitude of God, is not the exclusive prerogative of the monk." He believes that everyone who deeply feels the desire and need will find or create a place apart - a place to go with regular frequency for prayer and solitude. Each chapter describes a monastic practice that can be adapted or adopted by the layperson seeking to develop a more prayerful routine on the spiritual journey. The original "A Place Apart" grew out of several years of what Fr. Pennington calls "colloquia or monastic bull sessions" with men who came to the monastery as part of their process of vocation discernment. And the decision to publish the interesting and thought-provoking substance of those sessions was the result of his desire to respond to the many men and women who were looking for monastic values and practices to incorporate into their often very active lives. Fr. Pennington goes on to emphasize the importance of silence in the monastic life, but reminds us that although Trappists do not take a vow of silence, they do follow rules that require silence at certain times and in special places. And to us he says, "If you want the value of silence in your life you will have to find or create places of silence, you will have to agree on times of silence." When Fr. Pennington treats the subject of work and the monk, and how the layperson might adopt the monastic attitude toward work, he makes the point that although the monk "is to be conscious of his duty to cooperate with the divine creative energies in moving the creation along toward its goal," that duty is not solely "...the prerogative of monks, but the call of all Christians." In his Postword to the book, Fr. Pennington urges us to go beyond wishing to live like Christ. "We have to be eminently practical about such wishes and make them efficacious desires by practical planning and action."

Rating:
Summary: Affectionately Written Work For Everyone
Review: The vocation of being a monk is one that grows increasingly more difficult to understand for the many of us who live in the hustle and bustle of the modern world, but thanks to Father Pennington's beautiful work, monastic life becomes an inspiration to us all. Not at all intended to recruit prospective brothers, instead this book transcribes the habits of being a monk into our daily lives, so that we all may know the peace that these devoted brothers have as they pray for all of us in the rest of the world. "A Place Apart" is an inspiration for any who read it, and demonstrates effectively the necessity for silence and prayer in whatever it is we may do.