Stability - 16 December 2011

One of the promises a Benedictine Oblate makes is the one we call the vow of Stability. I think it originally meant mainly that a monk or a nun did not go flitting around from one monastery to another in order to get a better abbot or a better bed, or a better cook. Whatever else stability meant, it certainly meant that the monk or the nun was committed to one monastery for better or for worse, and the Holy Rule was the structure within which they lived there peaceably and without grumbling. Benedict was very much against grumbling.

But we don’t live in monasteries. Stability, whether we live in a monastery or not, comes to have a very much richer meaning. We tend not to live in one place, even in our senior years, and life is a journey. Everything is mobile now. Even the elderly and the dependent may have to move. So the analogy of the pilgrim very much applies. It becomes important to life and faith that we know when and how to change -- whether it is our way of doing something, our opinions, our attitudes. We move along the road and the scenery here and the challenges and the truth we apprehend are not the same as they were last week.

So Stability is deeper. There is a part of us which, somewhere along the way, has made some choices. My Scottish grandmother, who must have been quite a girl in her day but now was old and feeble, told her son, “I didn’t leave it until now to get my roof properly thatched.”

I can’t say strongly enough that this place of stability is not any hidden form of dogmatism or bigotry. But unless there is a centre which has become still, settled, and I would say deeply loving and grateful, then no matter what our expressed opinion and actions are, out in the world and on the road, we may be what St Paul calls sounding brass and a tinkling cymbal.

Stability is a function of Christian maturity -- not so much a function of age, as of the factors and experiences along the way and down the years that made us more humble and more loving, and most important of all, less afraid. In the discipline and stillness of Christian Meditation we simply come closer to that place where God’s Spirit can make these changes in us. Wisdom turns out to be not the sum of everything we know, but the stillness and simplicity that opens our hearts to wonder and goodness, enables us to bear pain including the pain of others, and always helps us to be unafraid of the truth.