(no subject)
Dec. 11th, 2005 05:19 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mommydamaTHE DOMESTIC MONASTERY...
January 7, 2001
Carlo Carretto, one of the leading spiritual writers of the past half-century, lived for more than a dozen years as a hermit in the Sahara desert. Alone, with only the Blessed Sacrament for company, milking a goat for his food, and translating the bible into the local Bedouin language, he prayed for long hours by himself. Returning to Italy one day to visit his mother, he came to a startling realization: His mother, who for more than thirty years of her life had been so busy raising a family that she scarcely ever had a private minute for herself, was more contemplative than he was.
Carretto, though, was careful to draw the right lesson from this. What this taught was not that there was anything wrong with what he had been doing in living as a hermit. The lesson was rather that there was something wonderfully right about what his mother had been doing all these years as she lived the interrupted life amidst the noise and incessant demands of small children. He had been in a monastery, but so had she.
What is a monastery? A monastery is not so much a place set apart for monks and nuns as it is a place set apart (period). It is also a place to learn the value of powerlessness and a place to learn that time is not ours, but God's.
Our home and our duties can, just like a monastery, teach us those things. John of the Cross once described the inner essence of monasticism in these words: "But they, O my God and my life, will see and experience your mild touch, who withdraw from the world and become mild, bringing the mild into harmony with the mild, thus enabling themselves to experience and enjoy you." What John suggests here is that two elements make for a monastery: withdrawal from the world and bringing oneself into harmony with the mild.
Although he was speaking about the vocation of monastic monks and nuns, who physically withdraw from the world, the principle is equally valid for those of us who cannot go off to monasteries and become monks and nuns. Certain vocations offer the same kind of opportunity for contemplation. They too provide a desert for reflection.
For example, the mother who stays home with small children experiences a very real withdrawal from the world. Her existence is definitely monastic. Her tasks and preoccupations remove her from the centres of power and social importance. And she feels it. Moreover her sustained contact with young children (the mildest of the mild) gives her a privileged opportunity to be in harmony with the mild, that is, to attune herself to the powerlessness rather than to the powerful.
Moreover, the demands of young children also provide her with what St. Bernard, one of the great architects of monasticism, called the "monastic bell". All monasteries have a bell. Bernard, in writing his rules for monasticism, told his monks that whenever the monastic bell rang, they were to drop whatever they were doing and go immediately to the particular activity (prayer, meals, work, study, sleep) to which the bell was summoning them. He was adamant that they respond immediately, stating that if they were writing a letter they were to stop in mid-sentence when the bell rang. The idea in his mind was that when the bell called, it called you to the next task and you were to respond immediately, not because you want to, but because it's time for that task and time isn't your time, it's God's time. For him, the monastic bell was intended as a discipline to stretch the heart by always taking you beyond your own agenda to God's agenda.
Hence, a mother raising children, perhaps in a more privileged way even than a professional contemplative, is forced, almost against her will, to constantly stretch her heart. For years, while raising children, her time is never her own, her own needs have to be kept in second place, and every time she turns around a hand is reaching out and demanding something. She hears the monastic bell many times during the day and she has to drop things in mid-sentence and respond, not because she wants to, but because it's time for that activity and time isn't her time, but God's time. The rest of us experience the monastic bell each morning when our alarm clock rings and we get out of bed and ready ourselves for the day, not because we want to, but because it's time.
The principles of monasticism are time-tested, saint-sanctioned, and altogether-trustworthy. But there are different kinds of monasteries, different ways of putting ourselves into harmony with the mild, and different kinds of monastic bells. Response to duty can monastic prayer, a needy hand can be a monastic bell, and working without status and power can constitute a withdrawal into a monastery where God can meet us. The domestic can be the monastic.
http://www.ronrolheiser.com/arc0107.html
January 7, 2001
Carlo Carretto, one of the leading spiritual writers of the past half-century, lived for more than a dozen years as a hermit in the Sahara desert. Alone, with only the Blessed Sacrament for company, milking a goat for his food, and translating the bible into the local Bedouin language, he prayed for long hours by himself. Returning to Italy one day to visit his mother, he came to a startling realization: His mother, who for more than thirty years of her life had been so busy raising a family that she scarcely ever had a private minute for herself, was more contemplative than he was.
Carretto, though, was careful to draw the right lesson from this. What this taught was not that there was anything wrong with what he had been doing in living as a hermit. The lesson was rather that there was something wonderfully right about what his mother had been doing all these years as she lived the interrupted life amidst the noise and incessant demands of small children. He had been in a monastery, but so had she.
What is a monastery? A monastery is not so much a place set apart for monks and nuns as it is a place set apart (period). It is also a place to learn the value of powerlessness and a place to learn that time is not ours, but God's.
Our home and our duties can, just like a monastery, teach us those things. John of the Cross once described the inner essence of monasticism in these words: "But they, O my God and my life, will see and experience your mild touch, who withdraw from the world and become mild, bringing the mild into harmony with the mild, thus enabling themselves to experience and enjoy you." What John suggests here is that two elements make for a monastery: withdrawal from the world and bringing oneself into harmony with the mild.
Although he was speaking about the vocation of monastic monks and nuns, who physically withdraw from the world, the principle is equally valid for those of us who cannot go off to monasteries and become monks and nuns. Certain vocations offer the same kind of opportunity for contemplation. They too provide a desert for reflection.
For example, the mother who stays home with small children experiences a very real withdrawal from the world. Her existence is definitely monastic. Her tasks and preoccupations remove her from the centres of power and social importance. And she feels it. Moreover her sustained contact with young children (the mildest of the mild) gives her a privileged opportunity to be in harmony with the mild, that is, to attune herself to the powerlessness rather than to the powerful.
Moreover, the demands of young children also provide her with what St. Bernard, one of the great architects of monasticism, called the "monastic bell". All monasteries have a bell. Bernard, in writing his rules for monasticism, told his monks that whenever the monastic bell rang, they were to drop whatever they were doing and go immediately to the particular activity (prayer, meals, work, study, sleep) to which the bell was summoning them. He was adamant that they respond immediately, stating that if they were writing a letter they were to stop in mid-sentence when the bell rang. The idea in his mind was that when the bell called, it called you to the next task and you were to respond immediately, not because you want to, but because it's time for that task and time isn't your time, it's God's time. For him, the monastic bell was intended as a discipline to stretch the heart by always taking you beyond your own agenda to God's agenda.
Hence, a mother raising children, perhaps in a more privileged way even than a professional contemplative, is forced, almost against her will, to constantly stretch her heart. For years, while raising children, her time is never her own, her own needs have to be kept in second place, and every time she turns around a hand is reaching out and demanding something. She hears the monastic bell many times during the day and she has to drop things in mid-sentence and respond, not because she wants to, but because it's time for that activity and time isn't her time, but God's time. The rest of us experience the monastic bell each morning when our alarm clock rings and we get out of bed and ready ourselves for the day, not because we want to, but because it's time.
The principles of monasticism are time-tested, saint-sanctioned, and altogether-trustworthy. But there are different kinds of monasteries, different ways of putting ourselves into harmony with the mild, and different kinds of monastic bells. Response to duty can monastic prayer, a needy hand can be a monastic bell, and working without status and power can constitute a withdrawal into a monastery where God can meet us. The domestic can be the monastic.
http://www.ronrolheiser.com/arc0107.html
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2005-12-11 06:56 pm (UTC)It's so much harder for the men to stay close to God, out IN the world, and worrying about money...
no subject
Date: 2005-12-11 10:10 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-12-11 08:31 pm (UTC)I think it's good to be reminded that raising small children in isolation is possible if you call on God, but it's wrong to set up the experience of modern isolated family as normative. We are not under monastic vows, we're raising children in horrifically difficult circumstances, and men telling us to offer it up can stick in their ear.
no subject
Date: 2005-12-11 09:48 pm (UTC)When there were 3 women to each hut and your whole family was in the village...there were also many, many more children per woman, and everything had to be cooked from scratch (and grown, and tended, and harvested), and there were no convenient cleaning methods (washing machines, vacuums, showers, etc etc). I feel like there has been and will always be a very humbling, frustrating and unique aspect to motherhood that very much involves giving up a lot of who you are and most to all of your time.
That said, we DO all need to be reminded to seek out friends, and we do often deserve more interaction with adults then we get.
no subject
Date: 2005-12-12 01:11 pm (UTC)I am in a reasonable situation - I have one in diapers and two school age. I have a semi-functional support system and I live in a city with public transit. I live in dense urban housing so in a real emergency if I *absolutely had to,* I could ask my nighbors for help.
Women at home in the suburbs with more than one in diapers aren't in a reasonable situation and I think going all mystic about how special it must be to have post-partum incontinence when you cannot get to the bathroom without major logistical planning is stupid. I also think it's pretty stupid to recognize as an adult that your mother was amazing. It's like, wow, look, sky! It's blue! Articles like this are thinly veiled "look at me, I am SUCH A GOOD CHRISTIAN for recognizing that women exist!" It's not about women or mothers, it's about the author's giant ego.
no subject
Date: 2005-12-13 12:01 pm (UTC)I just wanted to point out that I have a homeschooled 5 year old daughter, a 4 year old boy with sensory integration disorder who requires a lot of extra attention and therapies (that I do), a 22 month old with EXTREME high needs and energy, and a 2 month old (granted, he is the easiest baby ever). I'm tandem nursing and cloth diapering the infant and toddler, and I live in the suburbs. I do not have a single mommy friend and only one family member in town. We have never hired a babysitter. We also have one vehicle so while daddy is working all day and into the night, I'm stuck in the house unless we walk to the grocery store or around the neighborhood.
I'm not saying "Look how much I rock!!!" - I'm just saying that I am in the kind of situation you're talking about, and I still agree with this author and think he's made wonderful points.
It IS very obvious that mothers are great - but I think it's very rare for ANYONE to realize all their mother did before they're older, or possibly even have their own kids. I didn't hear any ego here at all.
no subject
Date: 2005-12-12 11:49 am (UTC)Thanks for this. :)
One of the priests at our wedding preached about the similarities between marriage and cenobitic monasticism, so the concept wasn't quite foreign to me. I remember his sermon very well.
(Thank you, Fr. Photios...)
no subject
Date: 2005-12-12 01:13 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-12-12 01:35 pm (UTC)And I do say "hurrah" to any man or woman that recognizes that. Not that women have a worse lot, but that a woman's "row to hoe" can and does and is DESIGNED to have the same results as a man's or monastic.
no subject
Date: 2005-12-12 01:41 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-12-12 02:07 pm (UTC)I need to come up with one for my MIL's forehead...
no subject
Date: 2005-12-13 12:05 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-12-12 01:45 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-12-12 01:48 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-12-12 02:07 pm (UTC)The kids will love them. Kids always love stickers.
no subject
Date: 2005-12-13 10:45 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-12-13 12:07 pm (UTC)He Chrismated me. And married me. 'N stuff. Big influence.