Month: October 2019

The Truce of Saint Benedict and the Rules of the Road

You, who are on the road,
Must have a code
That you can live by. “Teach Your Children,” Graham Nash

Two recent conversations got me thinking about Saint Benedict. One had to do with whether older women (like me) should color their hair. I stopped the dye jobs a few years back, after months of dissuasion from my hairdresser (who had a financial interest) and my daughter (who presumably had my welfare at heart). They wondered: Why would I want to look old, to give up? In the recent conversation at my yoga group, I shared that going gray had been wonderful – no cost and no monitoring of the root line. The group was evenly divided on this topic. The other, much more serious discussion which brought to mind the good saint, was about a friend who had died despite fighting “the good fight” for a very long time. Death was the metaphorical enemy and our friend had “lost.” And why did this all remind me of Saint Benedict? For him, old age was not a battle, it was a truce.

St. Benedict lived a very long time ago, dying around 547. He founded small monasteries which eventually became a religious order and wrote the Rule of Saint Benedict, a set of guidelines noteworthy for its humanity. In the Prologue to this little volume, Benedict tells us that if we grow old it is by way of a truce with God, so that we may have time to “amend our misdeeds” and “to safeguard love.” A truce, not a war. Old age has a purpose for the good saint – one that should not be forgotten or (presumably) fought against.

When we fight old age and death against all odds, what are we fighting against? The universe? The inevitable? Is it heroic (and surely it seems so sometimes) or is it… a waste of the little time and energy that we have? Everyone must answer this question themselves within the context of their situation. But as we have learned the hard way in the United States, not all wars are worth fighting. But how to know what to do? Instructions might be nice.

If you look at St. Benedict’s slender Rule, you will pass a worthwhile hour. For his monastics, he set out the guidelines for life in a simple and humane way. He tells them how much they should work, read, rest, pray, drink. He counsels them on how to treat the young and the elderly (both with kindly consideration). I wish I had such a guidebook for my life. Many authors give us only questions (and this is a topic in itself which I will tackle next time, because it is my belief that the right questions might be even more important than the right answers). St. Benedict looked at his beliefs, and his experiences (not all of which were good), thought and prayed, and then wrote his Rule. It has lasted a very long time indeed. The rule is not primarily about faith – Benedict surely had faith, but his rule had more to do with the day-to-day experiences of eating and working and living with others and ourselves.

Others have written rules. The Old Testament tried to get the major rules down to ten; the New Testament further winnowed it down to one. Philosophers tried writing rules; here is Spinoza:

Yet, as it is necessary that while we are endeavoring to attain our purpose, and bring the understanding into the right path we should carry on our life, we are compelled first of all to lay down certain rules of life as provisionally good.

Note that even Spinoza’s rules were provisional. Parents have rules. As children, we used to joke about the “Rules of Dad,” which were not provisional and covered everything from politics to what time dinner should be served. Our society has rules of etiquette and political correctness. We have game rules and laws of the land. But as old age envelopes us and death approaches, I wish for a manual for this last period of life. And not the Art of War. I know that if I fight I cannot ultimately win, but I would like at least to be graceful in my capitulation.

Of course, to write rules, one must have an idea of what one believes, what one’s aims are. The definition of Credo is “statement of beliefs or aims which guides one’s actions.” Do you have a Credo? I am not talking about a religious creed, although for people of faith this might be the basis for a personal one. Writing a Credo would seem to be a worthwhile exercise and something perhaps we should all undertake just to see if we could put our operating principles into words. And then the rules would follow – “to attain our purpose,” as Spinoza asserts.

This week I have provided the first chapter of The Order of the Stock Farm Jesus, a novel I wrote a few years ago. It’s about an older women and a little girl who embark on the project of writing rules for life. Enjoy. And try writing your own rules.

What If We Started Telling the Truth?

Jonathan Franzen caused a stir last month. Not with a new bestseller (he is the author of The Corrections and Freedom – I strongly recommend the latter), but with a considered piece for The New Yorker entitled “What If We Stopped Pretending” and subtitled “The climate apocalypse is coming. To prepare for it, we have to admit that we can’t prevent it.” Yes we can, says Obama (although he turned out to be wrong in the short run). No we can’t, says Franzen, and we had better start admitting it. The New Yorker was besieged with letters – but back to that later.

What is of real interest here is what Franzen has to say about us old folks and how lucky we are: “If you’re younger that sixty, you have a good chance of witnessing the radical destabilization of life on earth – massive crop failures, apocalyptic fires, imploding economies, epic flooding, hundreds of millions of refugees fleeing regions made uninhabitable by extreme heat or permanent drought. If you’re under thirty, you’re all but guaranteed to witness it.” So we old folk won’t see the worst of it. We are… lucky. And I would posit that perhaps we are lucky in two ways – we may die before the worst of it and we were young when the world was… less broken. We were young when children roamed neighborhoods and woodlands freely, when traffic was minimal, when shorelines weren’t dwarfed by McMansions and farms were places where there really were animals out in the fields. We have endured the grief of a world faded and transformed, but we did – at least – know that earlier world. We can try to tell our children and grandchildren about that world, but as I have discussed elsewhere (“Teach Your Children Well?”), this is difficult. We can take them to places where trees and open skies still exist, but these are now “special places” and not the world most of us live in. And, of course, we carry some of the guilt for our part in the brokenness of the world.

We also came out of a world that recognized threats and did something about them. Our parents had mobilized to meet the Depression and then World War II; our generation had marched to stop war in Vietnam and to ameliorate the oppression of our own people – minorities, women – at home. Did we operate out of hope? Surely. But it was hope tempered by fear of the reality brought to us by the nightly news. And, in the case of climate change, hope is not getting us very far and slowly melting glaciers are not often making it into the frenetic news cycle. And, perhaps, we have no right to hope as long as we do nothing.

If the old are lucky, it would seem that they have the least to lose in the current battle. Yet, as I write, 81-year-old Jane Fonda has just been arrested on the Capitol steps protesting this country’s inaction on climate change. We do care. We remember the world we had as children. We may be lucky enough not to survive to see the worst devastation, but we also have the grief and guilt of knowing the extent of what has been lost.

In the torrent of letters that The New Yorker got about Franzen’s article, his attitude was called “complacent” and “hopeless,” and he was accused of being “pathetic” and committing “moral surrender.” Others just argued about his facts and/or put their hope in technology and better allocation of resources. I, myself, am rather sick of the technology defense. It was largely technology that got us into this mess, wasn’t it? “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, but expecting different results,” says the genuine genius of our time. The minority that defends Franzen calls his essay “a welcome discussion of reality, and asks: “Wouldn’t we all feel better if we acknowledged the fact and acted accordingly?” I see both sides, and if Franzen makes some people mad enough to do something (think Congress), I guess that’s good. But I’m mostly with Franzen; I come down on the side of facing the truth. Even discounting global warming (and I say this knowing that it cannot be discounted), we have done terrible things to this planet, to our home, just in the lifetimes of those of us “lucky” enough to be over sixty. This must be acknowledged and it should be atoned for. But not by the telling of fairy tales.

The story for this week is “Luck,” a tale of two strangers and an eavesdropper about the attitudes we carry with us. It is about who feels lucky and who feels unfortunate; it asks who is lucky and who is unfortunate. It is not about how we make those judgments – that is material for another story.