Find a calm place amid chaos
As election unwinds, heed the lessons of ancient and modern-day monks
May I offer you some monkish wisdom?
Believer or not, it may help you weather these ugly latter days of an already long and grotesque presidential election, these final weeks of increased obscenities.
The wisdom, firstly, of that ancient desert Egyptian, Antony the Great, father of all monks: “A time is coming,” he said, “when men will go mad, and when they see someone who is not mad, they will attack him, saying, ‘You are mad; you are not like us.’ ” It’s a prophecy of irrationality, not unlike Pharaoh’s hard heart, or the itching ears of which Paul spoke, or the hatred that Jesus said was coming.
Irrationality within the church and without, an altogether human chaos. Another of our monks (more a bishop) Basil the Great; he likened the bedlam of his day to a great naval battle waged within a storm. His better counsel was solitude: “But perhaps this is a time for silence,” he said, “What use is it to cry to the wind?”
That we have been here before is what I think these monks would first tell us, laughing at us a little for thinking our troubles unique or new. “Vanity of vanities,” they’d likely quote us, reminding us that there is indeed nothing new under the sun.
But they would, I think, also warn us of the serious dangers of our hatred, our infighting and outfighting. They’d warn us that the anger we think righteous or intelligent can, and probably will, come back to belittle us.
That’s what our great old theologian Gregory Nazianzen said once; that the bitter insults Christians trade with each other do little but put the church on a stage, making all believers, all people of faith, laughable. As in Kierkegaard’s famous parable, we’ve all become like a clown shouting that the house is on fire, but whom nobody believes because he’s been such a joke for so long.
They’d likely also counsel dispassionate distance, a measured and healthy disengagement from enablers of anger. They’d have a word, no doubt, about what we oddly call our “media consumption.”
One of our modern more brilliant monks, Thomas Merton, writing in the late 1960s at the height of racial and cultural tension, reflected rather presciently upon the influence of various media. Although a great commentator on contemporary events, Merton said that he always preferred his news a little stale, a little old. “The news reaches me,” he said, “no longer as a stimulant.” He likened it to giving up smoking — hard to do but good for you.
Now he didn’t think a person should quit reading the news altogether. That would be quite a dangerous thing to do. Rather, he said, “When you hear the news without the ‘need’ to hear it, it treats you differently. And you treat it differently too.” For him it was about renouncing “self-hypnosis,” about undoing what he called “the unquiet universal trance.”
Keeping a healthy distance, keeping space for silence and reflection, making time for the heart to settle and the brain to cool; take a breath, we’ve been here before: that’s the monkish wisdom I’d like to share with you.
Again, whether you believe or not, it just makes good sense. Avoid the instant hashtag and the angry incantations of cable news: that’s what they’d likely tell us, these monks more primitive but probably more wise.
So in the feverish final days of this election season, at the apogee of fools and foolishness, these humiliating days, remember these monks and their wise counsel. Or at the very least remember that there is a thing called wisdom and that it belongs only to the quiet, to the stilled and sensible.
Remember the good of such quietness and cultivate it within yourself. Because that’s where peace will begin, after all the noise of hatred has stopped.
Hopefully.