Binary thinking keeps us bound

The monastery must foster win-win in a zero sum world

I’ve been questioning the purpose of a monastery in a world that espouses lifestyles and choices that would stymie monastics who came before us. While the core principles of the Benedictine wisdom tradition continue to help shape a monastic worldview, many of today’s practices do not lead to expanding the understanding of our purpose. Some of them help us keep our heads in the sand.

The idea of the Fifth Kind of Monk emerged in my ruminations on the role of a monastery today. Many monasteries are downsizing or “coming to completion” as professed membership ages and declines. To give this reality a positive spin, I’ve heard the term “rightsizing” used to describe the selling of assets and the building of smaller monasteries designed for ready resale following the death of the vowed members. It’s perplexing. I simply do not understand why we humans, the supposed pinnacle of God’s creation, seem to restrict ourselves to binary thinking. The creativity and ingenuity of the natural world is anything but binary but somehow in our evolution we got stuck in either/or.

In the specific case of Benedictine monasteries in the Roman Catholic tradition, an obvious binary is those who are professed and those who are not. While I am not going to go down that binary rabbit hole in this post, I ask you to hold our tendency toward either/or and us/them thinking in your awareness as you read. I do not believe we realize how very deeply binaries are ingrained in us and how much they color and bind our thinking and thus impede our creativity.

One disturbing outcome of binary thinking is the zero-sum game. That mindset—for me to win you must lose—is evident everywhere. For men to be men, women must be subjugated. For Americans to be great, everyone else must be less than great. For the wealthy to stay wealthy those who have less can’t acquire more. For humans to reign, the earth must suffer. The reality is almost every situation could be win-win if we broke free of the constraints of binary thinking. Win-win must be a guiding principle of the Fifth Kind of Monk. I think it is one of Benedict’s core principles.

Before I react to national and world news or what I experience in real time here in my city, I really, really, try to stop, look more deeply, consider history, think, stay open, ask questions, and think some more. This may delay my response by a matter of minutes or a day or two. Sometimes, depending on the issue, even longer. But it is a crucial step, and it involves tapping into the purpose of a monastery as a spiritual center.

In a recent conversation with my sister in community, Joan Chittister, we talked about the essence of the monastery being the development of spiritual seekers. The monastery must be authentic to attract sincere seekers and then together shape a spiritual world. Benedictine monasteries have been doing that for 1,500 years. (An aside: monastic living did not begin with and is not limited to Christianity. My focus for the Fifth Kind of Monk, however, is on the Benedictine monastic tradition.)

In a binary-thinking population that has been moving away from monolithic institutional religious structures, might monasteries nurture a layered, multi-variate structure, a root-networked way of being and interacting, that could help shape a new world with a greater spiritual emphasis?

We humans do need structure grounded in core ethical principles. Since early humans first began wrestling with ideas of meaning, philosophical and theological schools and cultural movements developed common principles and values that the men (literally) recording them believed would make an ordered and happy human life possible. It is generally assumed that we honor these universal truths even while we continue to understand them in new ways as human consciousness evolves. Historically, religious institutions have played a major role in passing on these truths. So have political systems. And schools of thinking. All of which, until the present time, were largely controlled by a relatively small minority of the human population.

Today, it feels like all of that is up for grabs, that everything we have trusted to define us is in free fall. What is at the core of us? Gender? Race and ethnicity? Financial prowess? Intellectual ability? Power over others? Might the core of our humanness be our spiritual center? That’s where I lean into the purpose of the monastery and what it symbolizes. The monastery, and those who are part of its root system—professed, oblates, Fifth Kind of Monk, hermits, seekers, and those yet to be discovered—must bring a spiritual presence to a world that seems to have forgotten that humans are spiritual beings. That there is more to living than having it my way. That accumulation of stuff, tangible as well as non-tangible (think status and privilege), will not fill us at the deepest levels where we long for meaning and happiness.

I must look first and foremost inside myself. Although Benedict wrote for cenobitic monks, those who live communally in a monastery, our basic human search for meaning is individual. It is only out of our individual search for God that we monks can come together and be a strong root for a monastery that shares and nourishes a spiritual tradition in a much wider root system. When we can do that, we need no longer fear “the other” (that binary thinking keeps rearing its head) and we can begin to uncover deeper and more beautiful layers of spiritual community that works for good. Building on the wisdom of humanity we have inherited we can challenge each other to the kind of thinking and questioning, the kind of loving and caring, that can reshape our mindset so we can leave behind binary, zero-sum models and be what the world needs today.