Common sense at Saint John’s and Saint Benedict’s
Saint John’s
Hearing horror stories from men and women religious of other communities about what went on in their houses in the name of initial and ongoing formation has made me continually and increasingly thankful that Saint John’s store of common sense is plentiful.
Unlike a certain community of men I heard about recently, we never felt it necessary to assemble a local or general chapter to debate whether monks should be allowed to wear pajamas rather than their habits to bed as prescribed by Saint Benedict fifteen centuries ago (the Rule 22:5).
We have had our fair share of community characters over the decades, thank God for them, but community crackpots intent on imposing their idiosyncrasies, whims, and quirks on everyone else have been mercifully scarce, easily identifiable, and sedulously ignored, thank God also for that.
Saint John’s has been a place of common sense. We do not panic easily. We don’t even frighten easily!
[From Daniel Durken, OSB, in Colman J. Barry, OSB, ed., A Sense of Place II: The Benedictines of Collegeville (Collegeville: The Liturgical Press, 1990, 64.]
Saint Benedict’s
There was a time when young women found the rigors of the [traditional] formation program [e.g., strict enclosure, family visits only once a year, censoring of letters; even time spent in hospital could count against time in the novitiate] exciting and a challenging way to give themselves completely to God in prayer and work, in obedience and humility, in asceticism and self-denial.
As the 20th century moved into its last phase, candidates came from a society sophisticated in its psycho-sexual-social-spiritual development. Practices that stemmed from maternalism, legalism, and elitism were no longer held as sacred.
The formation directors at Saint Benedict’s Monastery did not lag behind the national movement to update the formation program and to help the community take a new approach to formation.
In the August 1968 Chapter meeting they suggested that the major objectives of the formation program shift from an emphasis on rules and practices to scriptural-liturgical spirituality, community-oriented life, and a conversion of life involving both separation from and union with the world.
The key word now was “flexibility.”
[From Evin Rademacher, OSB, Emmanuel Renner, OSB, Olivia Forster, OSB, and Carol Berg, OSB, With Hearts Expanded: Transformations in the Lives of Benedictine Women, St. Joseph, Minnesota, 1957-2000 (St. Cloud, Minnesota: North Star Press of St. Cloud, Inc., 2000), 14-15.]