Author touts a Benedictine way of life
Believing that life on a farm in the country would bring her peace and contentment, Jerusalem Greer set out to quickly sell her North Little Rock home.
After her attempts were unsuccessful, Greer’s self-described “go fast, gather all the experiences” approach to life drove her to a breaking point.
“I went so fast I broke my foot,” she said.
The Shady Grove speaker and author of A Homemade Year re-examines her expectations and way of living by “imperfectly practicing” the monastic principles of St. Benedict in her second book, At Home in This Life: Finding Peace at the Crossroads of Unraveled Dreams and Beautiful Surprises (Paraclete Press).
It was during the ensuing threemonth period of forced rest after breaking her foot in three places — which happened when a bench fell on her foot “in a frenetic frenzy to pre-clean for my cleaning lady” — that Greer said she realized her approach to life was an attempt to anesthetize herself from the pain of losing her dream of a life in the country. The directive she saw in Jeremiah 29 to settle down for the time being and focus on making a life right where she was took her to the teachings of St. Benedict.
Keeping in mind that her two growing sons wouldn’t be at home for many more years helped Greer to bring focus to being present with them as a family, she said.
“One of the things that I was drawn to [about Benedictine living] is that I was very interested in how we could bring more mean-
ing, more mindfulness, to our family life experience,” Greer said. “I knew that Benedictine monks live [communally] and their practices are based around being in a community … so I thought it was a good parallel between being a family and being a monastic community.”
One of the cornerstones of St. Benedict’s teachings is the notion of conversion: the transition to a quieter, more deliberately lived life. It’s a concept that Benedictine monks believe is a lifelong process.
Greer pairs vignettes depicting her conversion through practicing the domestic arts with instructions for activities which range from cooking, to making homemade laundry soap, to suggestions for Sabbath practices, and instructions for holding a yard-sale fundraiser.
For Greer, one of the most important lessons she and her family learned was the Benedictine value of stewardship — using one’s environment responsibly.
“I think we live in a very throwaway culture, where if something is broken or it’s a little passe or not so in fashion we toss it out,” she said. “What I really learned and what I really wanted to teach my kids … is that stewardship of what we have is really important, that we take care of things — the land, the house, whatever it is.
“[Stewardship] helps create the spirit for thankfulness for the things we have … [and] when we began to have that idea of, ‘Oh, I’m responsible. I’m not just a user, I’m a caretaker,’ I really think it has great implications not just for our personal lives but also our community.”
Greer and her family have strongly embraced the concept of stewardship ever since, she said. The family now heats the
house with a wood stove, and in the winter her family chops wood for kindling.
“We really believe in hard work,” Greer said. “We value working hard and that everything shouldn’t be comfortable, that there should be some hurdles. Stewardship and manual labor, and that idea that it’s important to work hard, it builds good character.”
The Benedictine values of stability, obedience, hospitality and humility are all values Greer documents putting into practice around her home and community, while noting a newfound importance to the component of slow living in one’s life.
“So much of our lives [are] lived in the car going here and there and multitasking,” she said. “We’re sitting eating dinner, watching TV and looking at our phones. We’re doing all these things at once, and maybe having a conversation with somebody.
“Once I began to practice
stillness, I couldn’t take the same sort of frenzied pace that I had before …. In some ways that was very frustrating, but in other ways it’s allowed me to be very present in my life, instead of trying to get to the next thing.”
Greer, an Episcopalian who was raised Southern Baptist, also takes her values outside the home. As a lay minister she incorporates Benedictine principles into her work with parishioners in a weekend workshop series called “The Spiritual Practice of Slow Living,” which Greer said is a more monastic way to approach life and introduces the idea of intentional living.
“As a family minister my goal is not to try to keep up with the world’s version of faster,” she said. “We try to encourage families to slow down and not be overprogrammed at the church. They’re overprogrammed in every other area [of their lives] … and I don’t think the church needs
to be piling on more frenzy. We should be a sanctuary of nourishment.”
Not selling her home, breaking her foot and the events that eventually led to her shift to a more Benedictine way of living life are experiences she learned from, and she said she doesn’t wish that her life had played out any differently.
“I don’t really wish I could go back and say ‘Hey, everything’s going to be OK.’ I’m grateful for it. My mom has this thing she says — that it may be puppy love, but it’s real to the puppy. I love that saying because it may just have been a privileged disappointment that I experienced, but it was real to me in that moment. … I learned a lot from it, and I would do it again.”
For those who are open to the idea of adopting Benedictine principles into their lives but are not sure where to begin, Greer said to start by putting away electronic devices.
“Put your phone in a drawer,” she said. “Start by turning off all the noise. Turn off the TV, turn off the news, the computer, the Xbox. Put the phones in a drawer for one hour, half an hour, with no media, no outside voices.
“It has to start with being disconnected, and practicing being present.”
At Home in This Life is set to be released Tuesday. Information on the book is available online at jerusalemgreer.com.