Joan Chittister - The Monastic Heart: 50 Simple Practices for a Contemplative and Fulfilling Life

I am writing this book at a time when the country and the world have just witnessed the frailty of contemporary society and, at the same time, the endurance of the human spirit. Shaken off our social foundations by a global calamity, an invisible virus we could not see coming, we each found ourselves at the end of certainty and the beginning of faith. Where do we go now as individuals to find our way out of the shadows and toward a new light?

The challenge is to determine what is being asked of the human spirit when the pressures of the time seem insoluble and our inherent energy begins to fray. What internal resources can we rely on then if we are ever to become the fullness of ourselves again. It is time to remember what it means to go on when going on is all we can do. Its time to discover what it takes to nourish the vein of tenacity that change requires as it reshapes the systems around us and to face having to cultivate a future we did not seek or imagine.

In every beating heart is a silent undercurrent that calls each of us to the more of ourselves. Like a magnet it draws a person to a place unknown, to the vision of a wiser life, to the desire to become what I feel I must bebut cannot name. The truth is that this deeper part of everyone does not simply develop in us like wild grass. It needs to be cultivated, to be cherished, to be sustained. Clearly, the satisfactions of social success or unassailable security or even the trappings of control are not the acme of the good life. Those things vanish like the horizon on a misty dayonce so surely there, now just as surely gone. It is the spiritual part, the elusive part, of the human enterprise that brings peace in the midst of turmoil, that does not strive to avoid the world but only to live in it well.

Sometime or other in every life comes the raw awareness that to live in a world ever clamoring, seldom settled, always in flux, it is only the depth of the spiritual well in us that can save us from the fear of our own frailty. And yet, ironically enough, the very challenges that wear us down, the very winds that threaten our stability of soul are also exactly what, by our confronting them, by our besting them, prepare us spiritually to face a muddled life with equanimity, with fortitude, with hope. But where can we start to become what we know, down deep, ourselves to bespiritual seekers in search of a way through a serious period, an astounding eruption of normalcy in our lives?

In every age there are those who have known the road before us and passed its signs on. It is that kind of wisdom sunk in bedrock and tested by the centuries that we ourselves now need to discover. More than any of the things weve been assured for decades would be our lives collateralthe certificates, the promotions, the money, the network of contactswe need the things that last. We need depth of heart. We need stolidity of soul. We need what the forays of time cannot take away.

At this crossover point in every persons life emerges the need to prioritize our values. We need a way of living life and seeing life that brings more human entirety than it does popular acclaim. We need soul.

It is those things this book seeks to explore, to test, to offer for consideration as we grow from stage to stage, from emptiness to wholeness.

The truth is that every major spiritual tradition in the world has a monastic stream that feeds it. This book is for those who are not necessarily looking for a church or an ashram or a monastery or even a study group to join; they may already have one. They may not really want one. What they are looking for is simply the wholeness of their spiritual selves that dwells within them already, often overlooked until the well goes dry.

It is finding the rest of the selfthe self we need most under pressurethat the monastic heart seeks out.

This small book carries the weight and wisdom of a great spiritual tradition into the twenty-first century. The Western tradition of monasticism has served all forms of the spiritual lifeboth individual and communalacross all cultures and all eras. It is a tradition that serves the seeker who desires a vibrant spiritual life but does not want to become the keeper of a system.

To invoke the insights of so revered a tradition invites the reader to understand the past, yes, but not to stay there. It beckons the serious spiritual seeker to examine an ancient lifestyle asking what it has that can enrich the present, once thought impermeable, now thought shattered.

Monasticism is the single-hearted search for what matters in life. Any life. Every life. It emerged in Rome in the shadow of a broken society centuries ago. It is possible, in the light of this period, that it has never been more needed than it is now.

Benedictine monasticismChristian monasticismwas founded in the early days of the sixth century by a man of high ideals in search of personal growth and moral integrity. Benedict of Nursia came into Rome, the center of the empire, as a young student and found it eroded to the core, a broken and disappointing place. Disillusioned by the political corruption of Rome and the collapse of its character, he went off by himself to contemplate what to do next with his life.

In the end, Benedict never set out to conquer Rome. On the contrary. He set out to create a new way to live the good life in the shell of the old, in a society not unlike ours. Not unlike us. People from every rank, looking for security, stability, sanity, sanctity, flocked to this new way to live a totally human life, a life free from slavery, inequality, and dangerous individualism. And people have been flocking to it still, in our own time, in multiple ways, from various levels of society, all serious in their search for the good life, the happy life, the productive life, the holy life.

Clearly, when anythingany institutionlasts over fifteen hundred years, someone ought to ask what it has within it that can possibly go on from age to age. What is it that can respond to each era in turn and, at the same time, constantly attend to the distinct spiritual questions and quests of each?