Brené Brown x St Benedict

The collab I didn’t know I needed.

Over a year ago, I wrote an essay about friendship and what living in community was teaching me about clarity in relationships. I joked that our little experiment in life together should be called ‘The Order of St Brené’, so often is her work cited in our home. I even invented an imaginary icon, though felt the need to add “I’m joking” to avoid accusations of sacrilegiousness.

Well, my husband knows me well enough to spot when I’m not fully joking. At Christmas he presented our tiny household with this beautiful, icon-inspired painting, by an artist called Mike Quirke.

Brené Brown

I was taken aback. It is stunning, emerging glowing through the acid-free tissue paper it was carefully packed in, but my first thought was - is this ridiculous? Brown is not a saint, but (like the saints, actually, surely?) a complex, fragile human, as prone to failure as the rest of us. I have lived through enough leadership scandals to know the risks of deifying public figures, asking any individual to lead us into the promised land.

I also had a pang of worry. As I wrote here, I am increasingly drawn to icons in prayer, but am neither Roman Catholic or Orthodox and don’t want to be disrespectful. Pop stars wearing rosaries as jewellery always strikes me as crass and I didn’t want to do be making a similar move.

Both these reactions passed swiftly once it was up. This kind, curious face shines in our dark hallway, not as an object of prayer but as a reminder of the kind of lives we want to live. And isn’t that what the stories of the saints are supposed to do?

I need - and I suspect you need too - all the reminders I can get. The longings of our hearts to become braver and more loving are so often muffled under geological layers of habit and distraction. The world is not littered with reminders to focus on deep intimacy with others. To, in Brown’s words, Dare Greatly. We are too useful to the various systems in which we find ourselves when we remain insecure, performing for attention like dancing monkeys, reacting to flashing stimuli and numbing our fears with substances and purchases. Resisting the formative power of our cultural moment require intention. Constant prompts. Rituals and rhythms. Collective, covanental commitments. Without these ways of structuring my time and attention, my values become as much use as those on the glossy posters which wallpaper corporate headquarters. Nothing but hot air.

Also, I think Brené Brown is not so strange a “saint”. The monastic movement which our tiny community partly takes inspiration from owes much to the Rule of St Benedict. The three Benedictine vows are stability, conversion and obedience ( I assumed all monastic vows were poverty, chastity and obedience but I think my source for that is Sister Act). Reading into them in more detail, I have realised how much these promises have resonance with Brown’s work.

Stability is a call to commitment. In a rootless, disembodied age, it is a radical decision to stay in one place, in relationship with one set of people, rather than running away when things get painful. It is a posture of seeking the common, not just my individual, good, and doing so over the long term. It is a strong antidote to our insatiable desire for novelty.

Conversion is no once for all moment, but an ongoing process of growth, being always willing to be transformed. “In order to open our ears to God’s voice and our eyes to God’s presence among us, Benedict tells us we must keep our hearts and our minds open to the ways that God is moving us. When we block the transformation that God is working within us, then we are not living into the Benedictine Way”. It requires an acknowledgement of our weaknesses as well as our strengths, and a willingness to be accountable.

Obedience is not about a blind following of hierarchy, but something more subtle. It comes from the word from “to listen”, and listening (to others, to what each moment requires of us, and to the divine) is at the heart of this vow. “The practice of attentive listening is foundational to the Benedictine Rule of Life.  Benedict wrote that everyone in the community needed to listen to one another, and that sometimes God speaks through the youngest person in the community.¹”

All of these vows require hard interpersonal skills, and I’ve learned most of mine from Brené Brown. Yes, she may have shot to fame through a TED talk, but I’d argue her work has a a similar moral seriousness to that of of St Benedict. Sometimes things become enormously popular because they appeal to the lowest common denominator, but occasionally the achieve a wide audience because they are deeply true. Her writing calls us to soul-work, the deep, painful unearthing of what needs to die within us for us to really live, and does it at a mass level.

At the start of her most recent book, Atlas of the Heart, she lays down two brutal, fundamental facts:

1)People will do almost anything to not feel [emotional or physical] pain [or discomfort], including causing pain and abusing power

2)Very few people can handle being held accountable without rationalising, blaming or shutting down.

I want to be becoming someone who is an exception to these rules. I think fully aliveness requires it. Pain-avoidant, unaccountable people do harm, and make terrible members of any community.

I don’t think it’s possible to maintain a healthy community and not reckon with these things in ourselves. Her work, alongside the structures and rituals of my tradition which provide a container for change, makes it feel possible to make the promises St Benedict envisioned and keep them. It is too hard otherwise. It takes enormous amounts of courage and vulnerability to commit to living up close with others. We are making ourselves woundable, over the long term, by covenanting to witness, serve and submit to each together. Brown taught us to embrace this, to see that all meaningful things require courage and vulnerability. We have difficult conversations semi-regularly, which she calls ‘rumbles’ (I am just not Texan enough to follow suit). And of course, she taught us that clarity is kindness. We are learning, together, to say what we mean and ask when we don’t understand. To surface unspoken expectations and assumptions and really listen. We practice this listening, this allowing ourselves to be challenged and accountable, because, as she says, “There’s no unity without accountability”.

None of this comes naturally. I don’t think it does to any of us.

We don’t know how to do [accountability] in our families, and we certainly don’t know how to do it in our nation. We’re just either not willing or not able to hold ourselves and other people accountable, because it is so vulnerable and so uncomfortable and so hard and requires such fortitude and courage ².

Amen. It is hard, but I want to do this hard thing. I want to be a real grown up, to be growing into faith and hope and love with others. The more I do, the more fully alive I feel.

I think Benedict and Brené would have got on. They were both no-nonsense builders of institutions with a deep sense of how humans work. Maybe we will get another (proper?) icon of him and put it next to her, so they can chat. Meanwhile, I’ll keep winking at this gilded face on my way out of the door, imagining her rolling her eyes affectionately at all our stumbling attempts, but cheering us on.

What else I’m up to

• I’m expanding my coaching practice this year. If you want to find more clarity, courage and connection in your professional vocation, your values or your spirituality, you can find out more at my website.

• It’s not too late to sign up for this course with Advaya on Contemporary Spirituality: Meaning and Mysticism in the modern age, and if you use the code TEACH-CS-OLDFIELD you can get 15% off.

 

1. These quote from this helpful summary of the The Rule http://www.benedictfriend.org/the-rule.html

2. https://brenebrown.com/podcast/brene-on-words-actions-dehumanization-and-accountability/#:~:text=There's%20no%20unity%20without%20accountability,do%20it%20in%20our%20nation.