Five leadership secrets of the Trappist monk

In the 07/20/2010 issue of the “Washington Post.”

Over the last thirty years I have had the good fortune to have visited and stayed in various monastic communities in Australia, the USA, the UK, Thailand, Nepal, India and Tibet. My monastic friends have come from such communities as: New Norcia’s Benedictine Monastery in Western Australia, St Benedict’s Monastery at Arcadia near Sydney, The Trappist (Cistercian) communities at Snowmass, Colorado and at Gethsemane Abbey in Kentucky, Camaldolese hermitages in Arezzo, Italy, at Big Sur, California and at the late Bede Griffiths’ ashram at Shantivanam, near Trichy in South India. I am an honorary member of ancient Dhe-Tsang Buddhist monastery in the remote Gyalrong Region of Eastern Tibet, and have completed a month-long meditation retreat at Kopan Buddhist monastery in the mountains around Kathmandu, Nepal. As a young man I sat in vipassana meditation at Suan Mokkh Forest Monastery at Surat Thani in Thailand, and at Bodhinyana Forest Monastery in the hills around Perth. I often have stayed with the yogi-monks at the Divine Life ashram in Rishikesh on the River Ganges. During the years I gave lectures on the Western Contemplative tradition in Dharamsala, in the Himalayas I was guest of the Tibetan communities at the Nechung and Namgyal Monasteries, and at Geden Choeling Nunnery.

I have learned a number of lessons from the monks and nuns who live this way – according to the Rules as set by their various founders. Though living a far less ‘active’ life than me, I can say that the values and practices that inspire, underpin and motivate their lives have informed much of what I do and how I do it – and above all how I imagine the type of leadership I offer – to myself and others. Stephen Martin, who wrote the following article in the Washington Post, succinctly enumerates and describes five ‘secrets’ that point to their success as members of communities that have thrived, somewhere in the world, continuously for many centuries.

Stephen Martin, who explores leadership as a speechwriter and as a business columnist for the Raleigh (N.C.) News & Observer, has written for America, Commonweal and U.S. News & World Report.

Trappist monks live apart from the world. But their rich and ancient traditions also offer vital lessons on leadership for those of us living in it. The Roman Catholic order, founded in Citeaux, France, has practiced prayer nonstop for nearly a thousand years. Responsible for supporting themselves, they have been entrepreneurs for just as long.

As times and market conditions have changed, Trappists have kept up by reinventing their businesses continually. Since the founding of Mepkin Abbey near Charleston, S.C., in 1949, for example, the monks there have sold cinnamon buns, ventured into logging, run a large egg farm and, most recently, started selling native plants. How have Trappists thrived through the centuries? Here are five of their secrets:

1.Get (really) disciplined. As in waking up at 3 a.m. every day for the rest of your life. That’s when Trappists rise for Vigils, their first community prayer of the day. They will gather for worship five more times before turning in at 8 p.m. In between, they work, study and pray some more. Their schedule almost never varies. Their meals rarely change. They talk as little as possible. Everything about their lives is ordered toward their mission of praising God.

On the surface, this routine seems like a soul-killing exercise in boredom. But tremendous focus paves their path to salvation. “The monk has a feel for the stark and the spare,” writes Michael Downey in his book, Trappist. “Fasting, abstinence, and keeping vigil are disciplines embraced so as to stay alert, awake for the coming of God.”

2.Throw away the key . At Holy Cross Abbey in Berryville, Va., where I recently made a weekend retreat, the doors to the guest rooms lock only from the inside. When you go out, there’s no way to secure your laptop or Blackberry or car keys. It’s a rather discomfiting reminder of what makes the Trappist world go round: trust, in God and your brothers. Spiritual growth doesn’t happen when we’re holding back or playing defense. It takes openness.

“Anytime you get put together with 15 or 20 people you don’t know, you’ll find things about them that are objectionable, and they’ll find them about you,” said Daniel DeVoe, the guest master at Holy Cross Abbey who is seriously thinking of becoming a Trappist himself. The trick is learning to appreciate the strengths of others, to give them the benefit of the doubt, to acknowledge your own shortcomings and work to fix them. It’s all about building trust, the ancient glue that, against all odds, holds together monastic organizations to this day.

3.Know your customer. During a retreat several years ago at Mepkin Abbey, I found myself alone in the gift shop with Brother Stephen, an elderly, startlingly fit, lifelong monk. He rang up a few items, swiped my credit card and asked how I was doing. I asked customers the same thing all the time when I clerked at a grocery store in high school. Unlike me, however, he actually cared about the answer.

I confessed, frankly, to being tired with a busy job, grad school, a young son and another child on the way. There wasn’t a lot of time for prayer, which was what I probably needed most. He nodded and remarked that perhaps helping raise my family was a form of prayer in itself. We talked for another 10 minutes. More insights, tailored just for me, followed — and I shouldn’t have been surprised.

As Michael Downey explains, the work of monks “is not to be understood primarily as a product for consumers in a marketplace. …The fruits of the monk’s labor are sold as a means of livelihood, but they are sold to persons, real people with deep needs, not bottom-line consumers.”

4.Shut up. A monk’s life is a study in humility. It’s about setting aside personal plans and ambitions for the good of the community, saying goodbye to worldly pleasures and doing highly repetitive work with few tangible rewards. It’s a daily exercise in probing your flaws and coming to terms with your own insignificance. This adds up to a perpetual assault on pride, and it starts with quieting down and listening to what your brothers have to say.

“We’re all so impressed by what we know,” said DeVoe, the Holy Cross guest master. But rather than overestimating our own abilities, he said, real knowledge comes from paying attention to those around us. Monks have a longstanding tradition of turning to spiritual directors for guidance in the contemplative life. The feedback they get gives them a better sense of their strengths and weaknesses and serves as a spark for change. “You learn things about yourself that you wouldn’t know otherwise,” DeVoe said.

5.Live in the margins. In his book Leaders Make the Future, futurist Bob Johansen notes that “true innovations are likely to come from the margins that are stretched, rather than from the mainstream.”

Trappists make their home in the margins. They labor in obscurity, their chosen path makes little sense to most people, and they’re criticized, sometimes even by fellow Christians, for closeting themselves away when they could be out in the world helping people with urgent problems. They have Web sites and use e-mail judiciously, but they take care not to swamp themselves with information and distraction. They remain, in other words, as counter-cultural as ever, and therein is their strength.

Over the centuries, as Downey writes, monasteries around the world (and not just Trappist ones) have served as “renowned centers of peace and refuge, the focal points of culture and education.” That’s surely because they have stood beside the mainstream and observed it carefully but never immersed themselves in it. Their perspective is always a bit out of step with the times and refreshingly original as a result.

“The logic of worldly success rests on a fallacy: the strange error that our perfection depends on the thoughts and opinions and applause of other men,” Thomas Merton, America’s most renowned Trappist monk, wrote in his landmark autobiography The Seven Storey Mountain.

More than 60 years since its publication, and centuries since their founding, Trappists still go their own way, focused and unhurried, free of the need for the world’s approval. By training, they’re too modest to say their experience with leadership can teach us anything, but we’d be wise to learn all we can from them anyway.

If you wish to have more information about Meath Conlan’s spiritual tours to India and beyond, please view my TOURS page here, or email Meath at: meath@diversejourneys.com

Everywhere I go throughout the world, I see a certain book standing out on the Best-Seller shelves: “Eat, Love, Pray” by Elizabeth Gilbert. I meet people of all walks of life who’ve enjoyed its pages. This book is really a record of one woman’s spiritual journey. It’s about self-healing that followed an emotional and spiritual crisis. There is more to it than that, of course, and this is why it touches so many hearts – even in what it seems to leave out, thus encouraging her readers to ask for more. But the kernel of this book is about coming to a place of self-acceptance; of self-love.

Many people who travel with Diverse Journeys’ spiritual tours to India, have the same or a similar experience. Though perhaps initially motivated in different and unique ways, most seem to arrive at that place of spiritual fulfillment, which is self-discovery. It’s essentially a journey of healing. Healing can take many forms. It can mean the inner healing required for a balanced approach to life that is able to adapt to changing circumstances. It may mean recognising the pleasure inherent in “things” and seeing them for what they are. Or it may open us to the healing of relationships, without which few of us can survive for long. It may simply be a coming to the acceptance of the “here and now” as the real source of an everyday practice of contemplative life. Gilbert’s book is about a journey to and through things that matter.

I hope that in reading this review from the New York Times, you will feel inclined to peruse the pages of Gilbert’s book. You may even wish to explore coming with me and my friends on a singularly special spiritual journey to Kerala, South India this November – an artistic and photographic journey we’ve called “Following the Steps of St Thomas” – the Apostle to India. For this journey we have the services of Professional Photographer Jim Nicholls of New York. Jim will join in helping us all bring a contemplative frame of mind to what we see and how we might frame our inward and outer responses to the wonderful sights India offers. You can visit Jim’s website: www.nichollsphotography.com

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Diverse Journeys also has other spiritual journeys to ashrams and beyond, in South and North India from October 2010 through February 2011. I invite you to have a look at what we at Diverse Journeys offer the discerning traveller who is spiritually inclined, yet not averse to personal change.

Destination Bali

Review by JENNIFER EGAN

Published in the New York Times: February 26, 2006

EAT, PRAY, LOVE

One Woman’s Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia.

By Elizabeth Gilbert.

334 pp. Viking. $24.95.

Early on in “Eat, Pray, Love,” her travelogue of spiritual seeking, the novelist and journalist Elizabeth Gilbert gives a characteristically frank rundown of her traveling skills: tall and blond, she doesn’t blend well physically in most places; she’s lazy about research and prone to digestive woes. “But my one mighty travel talent is that I can make friends with anybody,” she writes. “I can make friends with the dead. . . . If there isn’t anyone else around to talk to, I could probably make friends with a four-foot-tall pile of Sheetrock.”

This is easy to believe. If a more likable writer than Gilbert is currently in print, I haven’t found him or her. And I don’t mean this as consolation prize, along the lines of: but she’s really, really nice. I mean that Gilbert’s prose is fueled by a mix of intelligence, wit and colloquial exuberance that is close to irresistible, and makes the reader only too glad to join the posse of friends and devotees who have the pleasure of listening in. Her previous work of nonfiction, “The Last American Man” (she’s also the author of a fine story collection and a novel), was a portrait of a modern-day wilderness expert that became an evocative meditation on the American frontier, and was a finalist for the National Book Award in 2002.

Here, Gilbert’s subject is herself. Reeling from a contentious divorce, a volatile rebound romance and a bout of depression, she decided at 34 to spend a year traveling in Italy, India and Indonesia. “I wanted to explore one aspect of myself set against the backdrop of each country, in a place that has traditionally done that one thing very well,” she writes. “I wanted to explore the art of pleasure in Italy, the art of devotion in India and, in Indonesia, the art of balancing the two.” Her trip was financed by an advance on the book she already planned to write, and “Eat, Pray, Love” is the mixed result.

At its best, the book provides an occasion for Gilbert to unleash her fresh, oddball sensibility on an international stage. She describes Messina, Italy, as “a scary and suspicious Sicilian port town that seems to howl from behind barricaded doors, ‘It’s not my fault that I’m ugly! I’ve been earthquaked and carpet-bombed and raped by the Mafia, too!’ ” Later, she sees a Balinese mother “balancing on her head a three-tiered basket filled with fruit and flowers and a roasted duck — a headgear so magnificent and impressive that Carmen Miranda would have bowed down in humility before it.” Gilbert also takes pleasure in poking fun at herself. At an Indian ashram, she winningly narrates the play of her thoughts while she tries to meditate: “I was wondering where I should live once this year of traveling has ended. . . . If I lived somewhere cheaper than New York, maybe I could afford an extra bedroom and then I could have a special meditation room! That’d be nice. I could paint it gold. Or maybe a rich blue. No, gold. No, blue. . . . Finally noticing this train of thought, I was aghast. I thought: . . . How about this, you spastic fool — how about you try to meditate right here, right now, right where you actually are?”

“Eat, Pray, Love” is built on the notion of a woman trying to heal herself from a severe emotional and spiritual crisis; Gilbert suggests more than once that she was at risk for suicide. But where she movingly rendered up the tortured inner life of Eustace Conway, the gigantically flawed subject of “The Last American Man,” Gilbert has a harder time when it comes to Gilbert. Often she short shrifts her own emotional state for the sake of keeping the reader entertained: “They come upon me all silent and menacing like Pinkerton detectives,” she writes of feeling depressed and lonely in Italy, “and they flank me — Depression on my left, Loneliness on my right. They don’t need to show me their badges. I know these guys very well. We’ve been playing a cat-and-mouse game for years now. . . . Then Loneliness starts interrogating me. . . . He asks why I can’t get my act together, and why I’m not at home living in a nice house and raising nice children like any respectable woman my age should be.”

But wait a second — Gilbert is a New York journalist who has spent the prior several years traveling the world on assignment. In her chosen milieu, it would be unusual if she were married and raising kids in a house at age 34 — by her own account, she left her husband precisely to avoid those things. I’m willing to believe that Gilbert despaired over having failed at a more conventional life even as she sought out its opposite — complications like these are what make us human. But she doesn’t tell that story here, or even acknowledge the paradox. As a result, her crisis remains a shadowy thing, a mere platform for the actions she takes to alleviate it.

What comes through much more strongly is her charisma. On a trip to Indonesia well before her year of travel, she visited a Balinese medicine man who read her palm and proclaimed: “You have more good luck than anyone I’ve ever met. You will live a long time, have many friends, many experiences. . . . You only have one problem in your life. You worry too much.” He then invited her to spend several months in Bali as his protégé. At another point, Gilbert petitions God to move her husband to sign their divorce agreement and gets a nearly instant result; later she devotes a love hymn to her nephew, whose sleep problems, she learns the next week, have abruptly ceased. Putting aside questions of credibility, the problem with these testaments to Gilbert’s good luck and personal power is that they undercut any sense of urgency about her future. “Eat, Pray, Love” suffers from a case of low stakes; one reads for the small vicissitudes of Gilbert’s journey — her struggle to accept the end of her failed rebound relationship; her ultimately successful efforts to meditate; her campaign to help a Balinese woman and her daughter buy a home — never really doubting that things will come right. But even Gilbert’s sassy prose is flattened by the task of describing her approach to the divine, and the midsection of the book, at the ashram, drags.

By the time she reaches Indonesia, Gilbert herself admits that the stated purpose of the visit has already been accomplished. “The task in Indonesia was to search for balance,” she writes, “but . . . the balance has somehow naturally come into place.” There would seem to be only one thing missing — romance — and she soon finds that with a Brazilian man 18 years her senior who calls her “darling” and says things like, “You can decide to feel how you want to, but I love you and I will always love you.” Gilbert acknowledges the “almost ludicrously fairy-tale ending to this story,” but reminds us, “I was not rescued by a prince; I was the administrator of my own rescue.”

Rescue from what? The reader has never been sure. Lacking a ballast of gravitas or grit, the book lists into the realm of magical thinking: nothing Gilbert touches seems to turn out wrong; not a single wish goes unfulfilled. What’s missing are the textures and confusion and unfinished business of real life, as if Gilbert were pushing these out of sight so as not to come off as dull or equivocal or downbeat. When, after too much lovemaking, she is stricken with a urinary tract infection, she forgoes antibiotics and allows her friend, a Balinese healer, to treat the infection with noxious herbs. “I suffered it down,” Gilbert writes. “Well, we all know how the story ends. In less than two hours I was fine, totally healed.” The same could be said about “Eat, Pray, Love”: we know how the story ends pretty much from the beginning. And while I wouldn’t begrudge this massively talented writer a single iota of joy or peace, I found myself more interested, finally, in the awkward, unresolved stuff she must have chosen to leave out.

If, as a result of reading “Eat, Pray, Love” you would like to know more about our special Diverse Journeys’ Spiritual Journey – “Following the Steps of St Thomas” (The Apostle) in Kerala, South India – planned for this coming November, or any other unique spiritual journeys – from October 2010 through February 2011, please contact Dr Meath Conlan – meath@diversejourneys.com