Stability

Stability

by

Davin Carr-Chellman

Stability gets a bad rap: the connotation suggests boredom, lack of creativity, and an existential rut. Stability isn't fun; it doesn't go dancing, skinny-dipping, or parasailing. It's associated with mid-life crises and marital infidelity, when one or both members of the spousal dyad needs more excitement and joie de vivre . Think The Seven Year Itch , or, more complicated and real, Bergman's Scenes from a Marriage. Stability is something to run away from when the horizons of life appear to be collapsing; when one's choices in one direction all-too-clearly mark the thousands of other choices now closed as a result. Stability is safe, it invests in a 401k instead of visiting the south of France.

The negative connotations of stability as staid and boring and limiting are culturally reinforced by a false dichotomy between personal feelings and social expectations: if we are doing what's expected of us, we are necessarily ignoring our passions and neglecting our most authentic selves. In this Eat, Pray, Love model of personal fulfillment, the escape hatch is to follow your passion; stability is a constraint. Even though this rejection of stability seems like a thoroughly modern, or postmodern, path -- something enforced by "life-coaches," for-profit youth sports pushers, and candy-pop music -- the reality is quite the opposite; it's human nature and as old as fire, or, rather, our consciousness of fire. Encephalization, our brain-iness, is the 3-million-year-old primordial stew of self-consciousness. Ancient stories, myths, and writings are full of this ur-drive for immediate gratification and passion-satisfaction. On the other hand, these ancient tales are equally full of heroes who resist.

One of my favorite writers, Will Willimon, recognizes stability as a primary point of this resistance. He says, “personal feelings are notoriously fleeting and unreliable. Surviving and navigating the vicissitudes of life requires something much more. . . stable." Stability sustains life’s goodness. The pursuit of happiness is inadequate for meeting human needs; it's like chasing the wind. In a similar vein, T. Berry Brazelton, the famous pediatrician, talks about the irreducible needs of children, most of which have stability at heart: the need for ongoing nurturing relationships, the need for physical protection, safety, and regulation, the need for experiences tailored to individual differences, the need for developmentally appropriate experiences, the need for limit setting, structure, and expectations, the need for stable supportive communities and cultural continuity (Brazelton, The Irreducible Needs of Children).

Saint Benedict, that innovator of growth-oriented communal life, characterizes stability as "the workshop in which we are called to work." Benedict’s admonition matches Brazelton’s wise synopsis: the context of the monastery, which has sustained more or less productive and functional community for 1500 years, and the context of nurturing a healthy young life through the struggles of childhood and adolescence both coalesce around this primary value: stability.

Benedict's Rule, the book that governs life in the Monastery, places primary importance on stability: Chapter 58 of the Rule of Benedict very plainly discusses the Novice's vows: "When the decision is made that novices are to be accepted, then they come before the whole community in the oratory to make solemn promise of stability, fidelity to monastic life, and obedience. The promise is made before God and the saints and the candidates must reflect that, if they ever by their actions deny what they have promised, they will be condemned by the God they have betrayed."

Benedict's emphasis on stability, the first of the novice's solemn promises, might seem like a life-sentence to some, but this sensibility shortchanges its radical implications, in Benedict's day and ours. In the monastery, as I understand it, stability combats acedia , "the restless boredom which gnaws insidiously at the monk, inducing him to 'foresake his cell and drop out of the fight'" (Buxton, quoting Harmless). Urban T. Holmes, pastor to pastors, tells us that, "The ancient sin of acedia lies at the root of the pastor's or priest's refusal to heed the calling to be the instrument of spiritual growth. . .These 'cold sins' truly violate the mission of the pastor to be a symbol, symbol-bearer, and hermeneut. They arise not from an excess of passion, but from a fear of passion. They are the product of a calculated apathy, sustained only by the embers of a dying soul" (Holmes). The symptoms of acedia are aimlessness, dissipation of purpose, restlessness, and laziness. Quite literally, the greatest enemy of spiritual growth. . .and human growth more generally, is this restless boredom. The calling to stability is the first arrow in the monk's quiver -- take the long view. Quash the myopic temptations and free your consciousness for nobler pursuits. The symptoms of acedia are not limited to the monastery, though, and their causes take different forms in different times.

The monks have turned our colloquial sense of stability on its head: rather than boredom and a lack of creativity, stability, for them, feeds the fire in the belly, quashes the fear of passion, and resists the calculated apathy that leads to aimlessness. This remarkable feat is accomplished through regular, sustained, dependable, everyday actions, not metaphysical leaps of faith or miraculous visions. The everyday-ness of stability means it is nearly always under our control -- other people and circumstances might create chaos, but stability is by definition resilient. Viktor Frankl and Alexander Solzhenitsyn provide powerful examples: in Auschwitz and the Soviet Gulags, situations most would deem impossible, they recovered and maintained a sense of agency and stability.

Benedict's Rule provides some very concrete guidelines for building and practicing stability. They are concrete and simple, but not easy, which reveals their profundity, I think. Earlier in the Rule, at the very end of Chapter 4, following a remarkable enumeration of guidelines for Christian and Monastic Good Practice, the reader is informed that "The workshop in which we are called to work along these lines [of good practice] with steady perseverance is the enclosure of the monastery and stability in community life." Rowan Williams explains that none of the Rule's concrete guidelines, ". . .is learned without the stability of the workshop" (pg. 152).

Ultimately, genuine stability cuts completely opposite its characterization in T he Seven Year Itch and Scenes from a Marriage: it isn't the source of boredom and acedia. Rather, it is dangerous and challenging not only in its resignation of an expiration date but also in the revelatory sanctity of a workshop that is stability in community life. Stability tells your partner and colleagues that you are in it for the long haul. Holiness is revealed through perseverant work in the context of serious, covenanted, stable relations, whether they be in the monastery, in the community, in friendship, or in marriage.