The Monastery: A Mutual Aid Society
On Community Taking Care of Community, by Katie Gordon
NOTE: are you a woman in your 20s or early 30s interested in spending a year living alternatively, discovering your deepest self, serving others, and growing alongside a monastic community? The Erie Benedictine’s monastic immersion, Benedictine Peacemakers, is now accepting applicants to begin residency in June 2025. If you have a few days off work or school for Thanksgiving, it would be a great time to fill out an application!
In the days after the presidential election, I ran into a friend at a show. As we lamented the results of the election, and what it would mean for the treatment of people and quality of life, especially for those most vulnerable, we turned toward the need for community to lean on one another in the years ahead. “I’ve decided, from here on out,” he declared, “my work is going to be all about building solidarity and providing mutual aid.” No more events for events’ sake, but for a social vision of community taking care of community.
Mutual aid efforts always seem to spike in crisis response, well-documented in Rebecca Solnit’s book A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster. In those moments, we become acutely aware of the words of Psalm 146: “Do not rely on those in power.” Instead, we realize that we are the ones responsible for each other’s wellbeing. Mutual aid is a social-economic practice in which a community pools resources and distributes to those in need. Neighbor-to-neighbor, we get by with each other’s support—sharing what we can, trusting our needs might be met by a stranger’s generosity.
It was timely then, a couple days after that conversation with my friend, that the daily reading from the Rule of Benedict was Chapter 34: Distribution According to Need. It reads:
It is written, “Distribution was made to everyone as they had need” (Acts 4:35). We do not imply by this that there should be favoritism, God forbid, but rather concern for weaknesses. Whoever needs less should thank God and not be sad, but whoever needs more should feel humble because of weakness and not self-important over the mercy shown. Thus, all the members will be at peace.
The society created within the monastery, then, is rooted in the economic practice of mutual aid. Community members pool their resources together, including by individuals’ salaries going straight into a shared account, and each month a member receives a regular stipend, the same amount. As further need arises, further support is possible.
The principle of “each according to their need” applies in later chapters of the Rule as well. Those who are sick must be taken care of “above and before all else” (Chapter 36). The elderly and children should be treated with “loving consideration” and allowed provisions as needed (Chapter 37). In the monastery, an extraordinary vision is realized: all people are treated equally, and equitably.
In many ways, the mutual aid of the monastery—an economic value system dating back to the time of its writing in the sixth century—is drawn from the early Christian church modeled in the Book of Acts, where all things are shared in common. Fast forward to our time, and centuries of unchecked capitalism have made such a communitarian society as the monastery seem idealistic. But the reality is, this concept of sharing things in common is much older than the profit-driven idols of never-ending growth, a system which inevitably leads to growing inequality instead of balancing resource and need.
For many of us, this most recent presidential election is yet another reminder that we must not look to an authoritarian structure for our well-being, but we must turn toward one another. Again, Psalm 146, after reminding us that we cannot trust those in power, tells us that God “is justice for the oppressed, and bread for the hungry.”
The Rule insists that this theology is not permission to wash our hands of human responsibility, but it is actually our invitation to directly participate in this work of God: to be justice for the oppressed, and bread for the hungry. To protect the stranger, to uphold the widowed and the orphaned.
When Mary Lou Kownacki, OSB was reflecting on the results of the 2016 presidential election, she pushed back on the spiritual platitude of “trusting in God,” and insisted on its reverse:
I believe God is trusting in us. God is trusting that in giving us the gift of life, we will bear good fruit. That we who claim to be on a spiritual path will accept our responsibility to co-create the kind of world that God envisioned. It’s up to us, each one of us, to be faithful to God’s trust and do everything in our power to bring in the day when “justice and mercy embrace.”
The monastery is a radical place because it returns us to this communitarian way of being together. For seekers living in the world today, the monastery is a spiritual center and social institution that can form us in such a commitment as a way of life. It makes the embrace of justice and mercy seem not only more possible, but the only way forward.
It is not easy to go against the grain of society—one which tells us there is not enough to go around, and that some people have to lose out in order for others to win. The monastery shows us that such a scarcity and competitiveness is a fabrication. We actually can create societies grounded in solidarity and mutual aid. It’s the monks that can show us how best to do so.
AUTHOR
Katie Gordon is a member of the Pax Priory community of the Benedictine Sisters. You can read more of her work through Following the Monastic Impulse: a newsletter that sits between our wisdom traditions, contemporary spirituality, and emerging futures. It offers an occasional glimpse into her reflections on living, learning, and experimenting at this intersection.
Sources / Translations:
- Everyday Sacred, Everywhere Beauty by Mary Lou Kownacki (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2024).
- St. Benedict’s Rule: An Inclusive Translation by Judith Sutera, OSB (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2021)
- Psalm 146: That God May Be Glorified by the Benedictine Sisters of Erie
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Thus my desire to return to this "radical place!"