A few years ago, I had the opportunity to report on a talk that Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor gave to University of Illinois law students. It was not long after the sudden death of her colleague on the court, Justice Antonin Scalia. Scalia often sparred with Sotomayor and the other judges of the court’s so-called “progressive” wing. In one of his more colorful opinions, he accused opposing justices of engaging in the “jiggery-pokery” of devious behavior. He derided another majority opinion, of which Sotomayor was a part, as the equivalent of legal “applesauce.”
For her part, Sotomayor described Scalia as “the brother I loved, and sometimes wanted to kill.” How then, asked one of the law students, did the justices engage in these intense disagreements and still manage to collaborate? Sotomayor gave a very Benedictine answer. They listen to one another.
“You may not like what they’re proposing, but that doesn’t mean they’re doing it from an evil motive,” she said of her fellow jurists. Justices can passionately disagree, she said, “and still see the goodness in one another.” She offered a recommendation for dealing with professional—and personal—divisions. Less talking, more listening.
I’ve often marveled, that the first word of The Rule of St. Benedict isn’t pray, worship, or even love. It’s listen. This small, unobtrusive word speaks in a whisper. To anyone who studies Benedictine spirituality, the phrase listen … with the ear of the heart becomes so familiar we can easily lose sight of how revolutionary it is. Listening in the Benedictine sense is not a passive mission. Benedict tells us we must attend to listening. In some translations of The Rule, we are to actively incline ourselves toward it, and nurture it in our everyday activities. Listening is an act of will.
When I look at the failures and disappointments in my own life, I can often trace them to an operator error in listening—usually my own. Even though I earn my living as a journalist—which is to say I listen to other people’s stories for a living—in my private life I’m often like the doctor who is her own worst patient. I’m great at hearing my heart’s desire, but not so adept at hearing the messages I need to receive from others.
Perhaps it comes from being the youngest in my family and having had to fight to be heard. I am also a person of strong opinions. That too can be a prescription for tone-deafness. Once, a colleague whom I respect called me on a Saturday morning to tell me he thought I can come across too forcefully at staff meetings. My initial reaction: ridiculous! My second reaction was anger that someone I considered a friend would engage in what I felt was a personal attack.
Then I started listening with the ear of my heart. I mentally replayed the tapes of some recent meetings where I had voiced my opinion. I heard my own voice. I could see that what I might consider passionately advocating for a position, others might find argumentative and condescending.
A friend who is a counselor once suggested that when my husband and I disagree on something, instead of repeatedly hammering at our individual opinions, we might stop and each repeat to the other what he or she has said, ending with the question, “Am I understanding you correctly?” It’s amazing how many times I have to repeat what my husband has said before I get it right, and he must do the same. We listen through the echo chamber of our own perceptions. The Benedictine Rule calls us to not only listen, but to actually hear.
Obedience is a blessing to be shown by all, not only to the prioress or abbot, but also to one another, since we know that it is by way of this obedience that we go to God.
—FROM CHAPTER 71, “MUTUAL OBEDIENCE”
Listening cracks open the door to another Benedictine concept from which most of us would rather run,—that of obedience. My first reaction is to recoil from the word. It conjures memories of being sent to my room or the principal’s office for not doing what I was told. Obedience comes from the Latin, oboedire, to give ear, to harken, to listen. The Benedictine writer Esther de Waal says that obedience moves us from our “contemporary obsession with the self,” and inclines us toward others. For those living in a monastery, obedience isn’t merely a rigor to endure. St. Benedict describes it as gift—a blessing to be shown by all. In doing so, he moves beyond the common understanding of the word as solely an authoritarian, top-down dynamic. He stresses instead mutual obedience, a horizontal relationship where careful listening and consideration is due to each member of the community from each member, as brothers and sisters. It is by this way of obedience, he says, that we go to God.
In our western civilization, this is a counter-cultural message. We admire antiheroes like Holden Caulfield in Catcher in the Rye, Randle McMurphy in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, or Don Draper in Mad Men—outsiders who lurk at the margins, test the system. We honor trailblazers like Hildegard of Bingen, Eleanor Roosevelt, Dorothy Day, and others who refused the boundaries of traditional roles. But in their own way, those women were listeners too—hearers of a different song.
Most people in religious life have a story or two about the test of obedience. Usually it involves a seemingly insensitive superior who requires them to detour from a plan they had laid out for themselves. In her memoir Scarred by Struggle, Transformed by Hope, the Benedictine sister and spiritual teacher Joan Chittister tells of being accepted to a Masters in Fine Arts creative writing program at Iowa State University. At the time, she was teaching high school English, but dreamed of writing the kind of literature she was presenting in class. The Iowa State program threw her a lifeline. She recalls how after she received her acceptance letter, “Every day was suddenly easier than it had ever been before. Every moment was light … I could afford to treat the daily nature of grades and papers and class periods lovingly. There was suddenly no burden to it at all. Just finality. Just conclusion. Just gratitude.”
That would all end in a single hurried conversation. In a complete reversal, her prioress at the time—the same one who encouraged her to apply to the MFA program—told her the dream of studying creative writing would have to wait. She was needed to work as a third cook (yes, third cook!) at a summer camp run by her monastery. Sister Joan needed the kitchen job, her superior said, to deepen her humility.
“And so began one of the greatest struggles in my life,” Sister Joan writes. “I now wonder how I could have become the person I was meant to be if I had ever become the writer I thought Iowa State would make me.”
As is often the case, we can’t see beyond immediate disappointment. In the end, what seemed an insurmountable setback only deepened Sister Joan’s conviction that she was meant to write. She overcame the confines of her superior’s order by writing in her spare time with an even greater fervor. Having published dozens of books that have sold more than a million copies, she says she now looks back at that dark disappointment as the moment she realized no obstacle could deter her from her twin vocations, as a Benedictine and a writer.
Sister Irene Nowell of Mount St. Scholastica Monastery in Kansas is one of the world’s foremost Scripture scholars. But that is not the path she envisioned for herself. She arrived at her monastery an accomplished cellist. She expected to continue her musical studies in graduate school. Instead, her prioress informed her she would have to study German. “I said, ‘Mother, I don’t want a degree in German,’” Sister Irene recalls.
“She said, ‘That’s not the right answer.’ So I went off to get a degree in German.”
Many years later, Sister Irene asked to study Scripture at St. John’s University in Minnesota. “I got hooked on Scripture,” she says. “And do you know what they said? They told me the German degree was the best preparation I could have had because at that point so much of the research on Scripture had been written in German.”
Scripture—and music—became the defining themes of her life. She has written a translation of the Psalms for her community’s Liturgy of the Hours and was one of the scholars who worked on the English translation of the revised Catholic Bible as well as the St. John’s Bible, the first illuminated Bible in five hundred years, commissioned by St. John’s Abbey in Minnesota.
“So