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

Joe’s Experience of Wonder and Awe

My friend Joe (29) was employed as an earth-scientist for a Multi-National mining company in a country on the Equator. What follows is part of our remarkable exchange with poetic insights relating to his experience of the spirituality of his occupation in that often difficult and challenging setting among people of another culture, far away from home and familiar surroundings.

JOE: So when I started to talk to them, just as I would my friends … and admittedly, I guess, my friends aren’t stalwarts of society, they’re not Justices of The Peace you know! A lot of them do drugs, or are on the shadowy edge of society … Anyway, I would sit down (with the local people) and talk about them as my friends – and what they were up to … Hey! Suddenly I was overwhelmed with stories! … Everyone had to talk to me, and had to touch me! (punching the air to emphasise) It was wonderful! (Pause)

They were just like my friends here at home. They lived a very different life out there. But they’re the same sort of people … So I naturally immediately got along with them, and they couldn’t get over that. In fact a couple of them used to describe: that I “had the Soul of a black man…”. Which was a great compliment for me, because these black men had much stronger ties to their family and friends. Their relationships were absolute! To be the friend of a native there, would mean they would be closely ‘by your side,’ no matter what happened! To the death, in extreme circumstances! If there’s a friend that could hold your hand across the chasm of death, it would, in my experience out there, be a native man!

MEATH: Do you wish to describe more of your feelings about this?

JOE: Another one of those ‘very hard to express’ things. But, it’s difficult to put into words. You’ve got to have silence to repeat the experience, to revisit it and say, “Oh! Yeah. That’s how it felt.” I’ve tried to put down and isolate the individual emotions that I felt. (Pause)

MEATH: You were talking about ‘silence’ as a tool for ‘going back.’

JOE: Yeah. Well, silence made it easy for doing that. It’s not like it was a conscious effort to go back either. It was something … that’s happened. It was ‘an unfolding.’ Yeah. It was ‘an unfolding’ of something that was ‘knotted up’ very tightly inside me … Suddenly a leaf would drop off and float down that stream that I near. (voice softens, hands and fingers seem to be orchestrating silent music, or painting an invisible picture) And then another leaf, and then another one … They were unfolding, and the longer I stayed there, the deeper, the more unfolded it became. And, ah! It was very energising, and, as I said, ‘cleansing.’ Pretty spiritual really!

‘Cleansing’ is the only word I can use to describe it, because when you compared how you felt to how you normally felt; how you felt in the silence, and how you felt in your day to day life, et cetera and so forth… it’s like, all those thoughts were less than where you wanted to be in relation to your inner self. … Things that were cluttering you up and bothering you … in the silence… well, they just went away. They were all gone. There were no thoughts.

There were no thoughts any more. So, sit there and say, “I was thinking it was like this, or …” No! I wasn’t thinking anything! I was feeling (leans forward with emphasis) everything. Absolutely in the moment. But I wasn’t thinking about, or thinking, “Oh! Isn’t this so wonderful.” No! I was thinking absolutely nothing.

Feeling the forest! Looking at the leaf and feeling it. Looking at the flower (gesturing tiny-ness with his fingers, squinting his eyes) and feeling it. Looking at the tiny fern that was growing next to you and feeling it. And ah, my field assistant was doing that too. That was the beautiful thing of it. I’m walking along and he’d get his bush knife and show me something, you know. “Look at this! Watch this one!” You know. And I’d just be looking, and I’d utter, “Oh! Wow!” I wouldn’t say anything, and I’d put it down again, and off I’d go again. Walking. Silence.

To be able to do that was like… I was getting so much out of those moments. Each of those moments was like a lifetime. You know … the experience of the dew-drop underneath the little piece of moss growing in a tiny bit of sunlight that was breaking through the canopy. This was a life-time’s experience; just looking at it. And (voice softening; careful enunciation of each word capturing the memory) feeling the cold of the water in the stream and listening to its sound as it ran across the rocks. Really beautiful.  It’s the essence of what people say is spiritual, I think.

A lot of people say, “Well, yeah, that’s the forest and it’s beautiful, and it’s this and that,” and they use all these words to describe it.

But that was the spiritual experience of being able to live in each moment. And have your senses so open in each moment, that they could just suck in  e-v-e-r-y-thing about that moment. The touch, and feeling, and smell, and texture. And the way the air felt as it came down into the lungs. And just  t-o-t-a-l-l-y  taking that in, and thinking about nothing else at that moment. That was … That was the silence. Very sacred.

Whereas at the start, when you first started to experience it … (Pause) Imagine a butterfly’s wing beating on your ear drums! (demonstrates boom, boom, boom …) That’s what it felt like. Almost like noise, but not noise. There’s nothing there. There’s a numb-ness and a mute-ness. So you thought: if someone started to talk … if you started talking, you wouldn’t even hear the words coming out of your mouth, they would just be dissipated   into the air, before they would even … Ah! The crack of the tree falling in the forest – you would hear it! Because there would be silence. It was all quite touching. A deep touching. In the deepest part of my self, my spiritual self.

If you or your friends would like to receive my periodical newsletter, which contains articles of human interest and spirituality, as well as information about forthcoming seminars and retreats, and journeys to India, Nepal, and Bali then please kindly send word to me: meath@diversejourneys.com

The following story is adapted from an article by Meath Conlan that first appeared in the London newspaper, “The Tablet,” 19 April 2003, p. 24.

The rusting, dust-covered work-vehicle sped across the broad expense of red Outback dirt. The heat of day seared the dry ground and the dust-devils played tag with the vehicle as it approached. Pulling up with a creaking of sand-choked brake linings, a tall, bearded ‘Ned Kelly’ figure leaned out of the window and said: “G’day mate! Been watching you settle in to the work around here. My name’s Cobber. What’s yours?” We shook hands. I introduced myself, and, in time, as the conversation came to an end, Cobber squinted at me with steel-blue eyes and asked: “So anyway mate, what do you really do for a living?” … Cobber thought I was a teacher, and wasn’t surprised when I said that while working along-side the men, I was also hoping to gather and explore some of their life-stories.

There were 4,000 workers at that time. The remote mining construction camp called Murrin Murrin – East North East of the gold-mining town of Kalgoorlie was bursting at the seams. We worked from 5 in the morning till 6 at night, through blazingly hot, dusty days. I have to say that in these remote climes I met and made some of the finest friends possible; men who had depth of inner life as well, for out here in the bush the last person a man can get away from is himself. And, given half a chance, for those who accept the challenge, self-knowledge is the open door through which we find life’s meaning and purpose. One day, one of the mobile crane drivers brought his rig over to where I was working. He stopped alongside and shouted a welcome with the assurance: “It feels good having you here with us, mate!” The fact that I was researching a doctorate, or that was a counsellor in private practice seemed not to deter the men from a genuine capacity for friendliness.

I remember once asking Cobber, for by now we had become good friends, if he considered himself a spiritual man. He responded: “Mate! I don’t reckon I have a spiritual bone in my body!” But as we became better acquainted he shared that his favourite quote, one of the most influential of his life, was the passage that opens the Buddhist Dhammapada - about our actions following our thoughts. It hadn’t occurred to him that this verse was ‘spiritual’. He just liked the words: they spoke to him of his own experience of these deep truths in his day-to-day life.

Cobber lived these words in ways that I had not expected out here in the bush. No matter how difficult work situations and conditions became, it was important for him to maintain a clear mind and positive good will towards all. He extended this attitude in a special way to all the men  on his construction team. He felt, as he put it, connected to them. “Well mate,” he’d say, “God is every man working along side me in my team.” He believed each of his men had an often hidden centre, a core, or true self that was “pure gold!” He held that the more pressure men endured, the better chance there was of that gold coming out into the light of day.

The archetypal leader, Cobber pushed his men as hard as he pushed himself; he compared their daily struggles to “being tempered like steel in a furnace.” Cobber preferred to lift his men’s horizons: to see “life as a gift.” A natural philosopher and teacher, Cobber felt it a privilege to “see depth and meaning in the world around.” He gave every man the benefit of the doubt, corrected their mistakes, and stayed with them, as he said, “until they came good.” Cobber found his delight lay in the inner spiritual growth of every man on his team.

Cobber feared nothing. He made sure every one of his men knew where he stood in relation to the perception of wisdom, truth and the things that are good and beautiful in life. I recall asking him if he thought that after some time, he found his men had grown, and what it was that he enjoyed most of all about his leadership. After a little while, he squinted his eyes and said: “It’s in the way they wonder. It’s their sense of wonder. As they waken to the sense of beauty and wonder of their lives and the world, I awaken to the purpose of my life. That’s what I mean by spirituality.”

At the end of my year with Cobber and my workmates, I felt their spiritual path was as authentic as any I’d experienced in many a monastery or parish. In his own down-to-earth way Cobber discovered the moment-by-moment opportunities for bringing out the finest spiritual qualities in the people with whom he worked. He did so by lifting them up; helping them see within and beyond the difficulties of their immediate circumstances: he gave his workmates hope! In this lay the pure gold of his sense of purpose in life. Thus he discovered the rich seams of spirituality in his life and in the lives of those around him.

Thanks to the experiences I had in the Australian Outback, among people like Cobber, I see how spirituality is not a finger pointing to somewhere else in the future. It is the actual thing I am doing or making now, and the way I am doing or making that is spiritual. The reality is now, in this present moment, the only moment I have. I trust I shall keep the image of Cobber, engaged in his own way with real people in each moment, before my eye.

If you or your friends would like to receive my periodical newsletter, which contains articles of human interest and spirituality, as well as information about forthcoming seminars and retreats, and journeys to India, Nepal, and Bali then please kindly send word to me: meath@diversejourneys.com