All good points
Whoa, @Bembo_Davies. I did not mean to offend you by assigning you to the “most Matera veterans” category. But, really – your original post uses the word “we” about 50 times (sometimes royally capitalised). It even starts with “Just in case anyone wonders what we actually do…”. I was mislead in believing your (singular!) words represented the fruit of some collective reflection. I stand corrected. My apologies.
You have some valid points. Of course, Protocol per se doeth not a community make “just as the Rule is not enough to make a peaceful, thriving Benedictine abbey”. I make that disclaimer right in the introduction. Thing is, living together is relatively simple (at least, that has been the case for me over the last three years), as long as you stay the hell away from interfering with how other people live their lives. What is difficult is coordinating over a long term project and using this dance as a way to build ever-stronger human ties. Insights and quite a lot of history (from the sceptics of ancient Greece to the kibbutzim) are to be reaped in the recent Book of Community by @lasindias.
My emphasis on getting things done (“chronic doers syndrome”) is also definitely one-sided. It comes from my own experience of struggling with inertia, and being de facto vetoed (even to get Edgeryders going I had to re-do several times a dog-and-pony presentation to my boss of the project she had hired me to do). I completely appreciate that others might see consensus building, or artful living, or rituals, as more important than getting it done. All I am saying is that some ways of interacting are more conducive than others to action.
I do not follow you completely on the “choral” part. Suppose you do something, without any help from me, that I really like and would have been proud to have done myself. I am going to rejoice for it, and to feel like I am a little bit a part of it, just because I can see better that you and I shared a vision, even though you were able to carry it through and I was not. Keeping to our Christian analogy, it’s like a devout person reading about the life of a saint and being inspired to make small changes in her very ordinary life. Chorality is about recognising the same ideal in the inspiring behaviour of someone and in our own modest efforts, is it not?
Also, I believe you are misrepresenting father Cassian’s words (the transcription published here is only a small part of that conversation. Ben has the whole thing). It is true that the Rule is about “living together, in relative peace, for a long time”, but the living together itself is instrumental to the faith. At the dawn of monasticism, monks were anchorites, or hermits. “But – said Father Cassian – most people cannot commune with God over a long time on their own. You could go mad.” In isolation people thought strange thoughts, and found it difficult to tell divine inspiration and spurious material apart. This finding looms large in the culture; you will see it reverberating in the theme of St. Anthony’s Temptations. Anthony was the first famous Christian hermit in the 3rd century, and remains the most famous one to this day. Father Cassian was simply agreeing with the Rule’s Chapter 1: there are four kinds of monks, two of which are worthless. That leaves the Cenobites, “those who live in monasteries and serve under a rule and an Abbot”; and the Anchorites, who have levelled up:
no longer in the first fervor of their reformation,
but after long probation in a monastery,
having learned by the help of many brethren
how to fight against the devil,
go out well armed from the ranks of the community
to the solitary combat of the desert.
They are able now,
with no help save from God,
to fight single-handed against the vices of the flesh
and their own evil thoughts.
You can be a monk (although an intense and scary one) without living in a community. But you cannot be a monk if your goal is not to commune with God. Similarly (one imagines) unMonasterians are not simply people who live together; they are people who live together in the service of some ideal, or at least with some common goal that transcends domestic life itself. When pursuing a common goal, people need to be working together, and getting things done. Hence my belief that enabling people to action is in general a good thing, and pertinent here.