 |
| Joan Chittister, O.S.B. |
THE ROLE OF ARCHIVISTS IN
A CHANGING WORLD
Joan Chittister
I’m
reminded of a story about speaking in your own hometown: A man was asked by his
hometown historical society to speak at their next meeting. When he arrived the
only ones there were the board members and a couple of old geezers in the back.
“Did you tell them I was coming?” he asked them. “No, I guess we really
didn’t,” the chair answered “but it sure looks like the word seeped out.”
And
from the philosopher Boethius: “Every age is a dream that is dying and a new
age coming to life.”
From
the paleontologist Chardin: “The only task worthy of our efforts is to
construct the future.”
And
from the Zen: “The meaning of life is to see.”
I have spent a great deal of time thinking about
this conference and this presentation for two reasons. The first is a simple
one: if there were ever a place where I would not expect to be invited, this would
certainly seem to be it. I would certainly understand
an invitation to colleges and civic social
groups, to spirituality centers and ecumenical programs, yes. But at a
conference of archivists? Trust me: until now, at least, the chances were slim to
non-existent
And yet, the second reason I’ve thought so much
about today’s presentation is equally simple: if there were ever a group I
identify with--as well as with writers and speakers,
with educators and researchers, with
historians and theologians, archivists are definitely it.
What that means is that I could not be
further away than I am from the life of an archivist. But it also means that as a woman, as
a writer, as a social scientist I realize my indebtedness to you and to your
profession.
I value your work and I respect your
dedication to it. In fact, I think the values and sensitivity with which
archivists approach the development of public archives may actually be what is
missing in much of public life today. Which is why I want to talk today about
what it means to choose a profession, to make a career a vocation, to decide
between making a salary and making a difference,
I want to explore what it means to make a
conscious decision between choosing a job
and making a life, about giving our lives to
something because it not only fits us but fits the world around us, as well.
And then I want to talk about what, as an
outsider, I see as the call and the social contribution of your profession and
your own personal lives.
There are several stories from the ancients
which, I think, make those distinctions clear
and the impact of those choices life-changing–for
all of us.
The first story is from The Tales of the Hasidim: “What good work shall I do to
become acceptable to God?" the disciple asked the rabbi.
"How should I know?" the rabbi
answered. "Abraham practiced
hospitality and God was with him. Elias
loved to pray and God was with him. David ruled a kingdom and God was with him,
too. Judith led the people and God was by her side."
"Well, then," the disciple said,
"is there some way I can find my own allotted work?"
"Ah, but of course," said the rabbi,
"Just search for the deepest inclination of your heart
and follow it."
Point: the development of the whole of the self, the
coming to fullness, to maturity of the abilities with which we were born, is
what life is about. The marriage of personal fascination and intellectual
ability enkindles both excellence and happiness in us. It brings a sense of
purpose to a delight in life.
But the best news of all is that everything
we are meant to be is already within us. It is simply a matter of choosing what
we shall do and be from the inside out–from what we have within us to do
it–rather than from the outside in, from what other people tell us we should do
or be or become, because it’s more popular, or better-paying, or more exciting,
or takes less effort or demands less preparation.
It is a matter of going where our talents, our
interests, our excitement, our gifts, our skills lure us and lead us rather
than struggling to go where prestige or status or power or money are our only
real goals and always, always, let us down in the end.
It is in the fulfillment of the self that
both fullness of life and happiness lie.
The second story is from the Zen: “Master,” a
disciple asks, “How shall we know that our lives are complete?” And the master
answers, “For the raindrop, joy is entering the river. Joy is entering the
river.”
It is becoming the most of what we are; becoming
the fullest of what we were made to be that is the measure of the happiness we
seek and the acme of the happiness we achieve.
For the musician, it lies in seeing others,
too, losing themselves in the tune. For the writer, it is struggling a thought onto
paper that someone else can identify with. For the born teacher, it is watching
a pupil succeed. For the gardener, it is giving someone else the fruit of the
land, and seeing the first bloom of the rose. For the builder it lies in
turning over the key. For the researcher it
is finding the one piece still missing in the puzzle.
It is, in other words, being able to do what
we do best in order to give the gift back to the world for whose good we have
received it in the first place.
And finally, there is a third story, this
time from the life of an old rabbi who was asked by the younger generation how
he knew he wanted to be a rabbi.
“It happened at the slaughterhouse,” he said,
“where as a child I saw the cows being selected for kosher. As the kine came
down the chute, the executioner counted them off over and over again: he called out, ‘1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8-9-and the
tenth one for God.
“1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8-9-and the tenth one for God.’
And I knew in my heart,” the old rabbi said, “That I was one of those.”
He knew, that is, that there was in him an
inner magnet, already drawing him, to the meaning of the word, to the call of
the Torah, by which he was meant to direct his own life so that the lives of
others could also be enriched. He knew he had a vocation, a direction, a call,
a gifting, rather than simply a profession.
There was a time, of course, when the idea of
such a thing as a vocation was reserved and said only of the clergy, for those
who were called to a special “religious” ministry in life, for those who
officially dedicated their lives to doing the work of God by doing the work of
their churches and the temples and synagogues.
These were separated out of the human family,
distanced from the common life, even dressed differently than the society
around them, called “special” for the sake of doing
special liturgical tasks. From this perspective,
a call was something professionally religious–not done by people like us, to
people who made the world go round.
A vocation was something that simply happened
to someone, without explanation,
without cause. Uniquely. Martin Luther called
it “a stroke of fate.”
But however it was named, everyone knew that
the call was a command to some special few from God to sacrifice their lives to
proclaim the proclamations of God–
whether they wanted to or not; whatever else
they would be unable to do as a result of it.
Vocation, from that perspective, was an end
in itself, not a unique gift particular to the person or even a particularly
intense or magnetizing interest in any particular aspect of ministry. It meant
simply giving life over to be disposed of in the service of religion as life
saw fit with little of choice left in it after that first and final sense of
call.
It was a good and holy and devoted life. but,
we came to understand
as the centuries went by, that it was itself
theologically deficient: that, in fact, we were all called to do something in
life that was life-giving to others.
We are all called to leave the world when we
depart it in better condition than it was when we came–simply because we have
been here. But to do that we must do what we do best. We must love what we’re
doing.
We ourselves must understand what we’re
called to do for others by doing it, what we like, for them as well as do for
ourselves. And we must give ourselves entirely to the doing of it with all the
skill it demands of us and all the commitment we have.
Because it is our vocation. It is our own
personal, private, special call to be co-creators of the world. We must, in
other words, have a sense of purpose beyond, as the Irish say, “Just knocking
one more day out of it till the great day comes.”
It is knowing that there is within us
something that marks each of us in a special way
and that this quality has been given to us
for some reason greater than ourselves and that that giving is of the essence
of our coming to wholeness.
The task of determining what that special
quality is and what we’re to do with it is the single great work of being
alive.
Point: the mind may know what we want to be
in life–because the social messages are so clear. We are to get power, amass
goods, get money and have comfort. But it is the heart that knows what we are
meant to be in life:
- signs and models of
goodness,
- givers as well as
takers,
- builders rather than
destroyers,
- preservers of the
best our society has known up to now
so that those who come after us may have
stars to steer by.
That’s what being a human being is all about.
And that’s exactly what archivists do best.
They devote themselves to finding the
brightest stars in our collective sky, the biggest ideas, the greatest events.
They have an eye for the discovery of the trends of the times, for recognizing
the underlying engines of social change: for defining its most sweeping
transformations, its most epochal undertakings its soundest ideals, its finest
examples of what it means to be a human being in inhuman situations, the most
humanly human lodestars in every category and quietly, carefully, they hang
them all on the tree of life for all the rest of us to see and take hope from.
But, the even greater question is this one: If
archivists don’t do it, who will?
Let me give you an example from my own life.
No, correction, let me describe for you a disaster in the record of humankind that
is demonstrated by my own life.
I’m a Benedictine sister. Benedictinism is
the oldest religious order in the history of the church. In fact, after its
more than 1500 continuous years of development from 480 to now, to today, in
2013 the only institution older than the Benedictine order in the Catholic Church
is the church itself.
Religious life for both men and women
hermits, ascetics who lived solitary lives had existed in the deserts of Syria
and Egypt since the end of the second century. Religious orders of both men and
women who began to live communally under what is known as the Rule of Benedict developed
in Europe by the end of the fifth century and existed as the sole model of
monasticism and religious life there for seven centuries, until the 13th
century.
During that period, history is clear, this
single religious order became the sole civic anchor and agricultural organizer of
peasant populations who had been driven off their lands, by waves of
internecine wars from one end of Europe to the next.
These communities were built in such a way that
people could cross the continent on roads no longer patrolled by Roman legions and
so now being ravaged by itinerant gangs of thieves and still sleep safely every
night in a Benedictine hospice–just one day’s ride from the Benedictine hospice
they had slept in the night before. We were the first Holiday Inns in Europe!
These Benedictine communities–of both men and
women–also opened schools, and infirmaries, scriptoriums and art centers for
the copying of manuscripts and the preservation of the arts and at the same
time, built the great cathedrals of Europe
as well. Historians say that it was Benedictines–men
and women who “saved the culture of Europe.”
And yet–and yet–when the monasteries of Benedictine
women–smaller, less endowed–
and so less secure–disappeared due to the
continuous attacks of marauding bands or collapsed under the burdens of
poverty, not one archive from a woman’s community in all those hundreds of
years was kept.Not one. Not one male monastery, not one barony, not one of the
great new universities absorbed those archives.
After all, of what importance were women or
women’s communities either, for that matter?
So despite the fact that their lives and
works were exactly like the male communities we have all been taught to revere,
an entire subculture of women was simply allowed to vanish from human sight and
thought: their experiences ignored, their wisdom demeaned, their contributions
buried with them.
Lena Eckenstein in her doctoral dissertation,
“Women under Monasticism” written for Oxford University in 1896, writes of that
period: “There is a growing consciousness nowadays of the debt of gratitude
which mankind as a whole owes to this monastic and religious orders (of women),
but the history of these orders remains…unwritten.”
She explains elsewhere: for lack of resources.
With the loss of those archives, with the
total disregard for the history of women’s communities–the history of women’s
organizations in Europe was lost while the history of men’s organizations became
the only model left of an institution centuries old.
The monastic history of women’s
communities–were as equally vital to the preservation of culture in Europe as
were those of the men. But their stories, their chronicles and logs and letters
and legal documents and royal lineage which they, too, brought to so many royal
abbeys were totally disregarded, simply fell off the face of the earth–leaving
their women leaders and organizers and social centers unnoted, leaving no tracks for other women at other
times to follow.
And why? Because no one kept the archives of
women–of the other half, the disdained half, the scorned and disparaged half of
the human race.
Where were the archivists then who would
judge such a history valuable, notable, necessary at least to the intellectual
integrity of the male writing and research of the rest of the human enterprise?
To this day, as women Benedictines we know
nothing of our histories, our great leaders, our dreams, our devastations, or
our centuries-old learnings about what it means to be either spiritual or alive
as independent spiritual women. We know only that they were there–and gone–and
made invisible.
We stand deprived of twelve centuries of
history that men take for granted, claim as their glory, count as their
success, and consider must be our models, too. And why did that happen? It
happened because you weren’t there–that’s why it happened.
What would those same kind of women want
today for the sisters who followed them? We don’t know and we have no way to
find out.
As a young sister, I set out to do an
historical review of women’s monasteries–the works they did, the women who went
to them, the contributions they left behind. After all, we had done that kind
of research for years on the subject of European male monasteries that are also
closed now but still being revered for their gifts to civilization.
So I went to the source: I went to a book
written by the Benedictine monk and historian,
Stephen Hilpisch, an esteemed Benedictine
scholar, whose work cast a heavy shadow
on the 1500 year old character of the Benedictine
order.
He was, after all, the national authority on
the subject and he had written two volumes of works on Benedictine history. The
first on Benedictine men called: Benedictinism
through changing centuries. The second volume on Benedictine women, A History of Benedictine nuns, the
introduction to which reads to this day: “The Benedictine nuns did not make Benedictine
history. This is not woman’s work.”
Clearly, without archivists a society loses
its history, whole peoples are made invisible. The world ignores the richness
of difference, the lessons of social change, the paths that were tried and
failed, the paths that were trodden over, the paths that were never tried at
all. And great ideas are lost in cobwebs of time.
Oh, yes, it’s true, the keepers of a culture are
many:
- they are the
musicians who write its songs and the singers who echo them down the ages;
- they are the artists who
paint its countryside and preserve in color for all to see both the tint
of its soul and the character of its people;
- they are the
architects who raise its aspirations to the sky and its poets who plumb
its heart and break open its hopes;
- they are its
chroniclers who trace its days and hand down the names of its leaders to
be cherished for generations to come;
- they are its
historians who keep alive for a nation to remember the glories and
struggles of its rising.
But musicians can only preserve what of the
culture of music has been given to them,
and artists are beholden to particular scenes
from given times and passing scenes from previous moments.
And architects come and go with the materials
with which they build, and poets provide an intuition of what it means to be
alive but not the life of those who lived it
Chroniclers provide only an outline of a
people and not the insights of the people themselves and historians tell the
stories given to them by story tellers before them.
But archivists hold the key to its memory, to
its conflicting ideas, to its struggles to make them come out even. Obviously, the
real keepers of any culture are you, our archivists.
That is your vocation.
The real keepers of any culture are those who
maintain it unedited and unadorned for those who will come after it to learn
from for their own age. The real keepers of a culture are its archivists. That
is your vocation, your call,
your gift to society.
Archivists are the deciders of a people. Archivists
are they who decide what to keep, whose work to collect, whose notes to
preserve, whose ideas to protect whose simple leavings to maintain so that the
leavings of many may be heard and heeded centuries later.
To be an archivist means to have a heart for
the matter and materials we know intuitively must have meaning in days to come but
have not yet a clue what that meaning may be. Archivists collect so that
others, centuries later with the perspective that comes from time and distance,
may realize what has really gone before us.
Out of someone’s well-organized archives come
not only the snippets of the past but the questions we need to guide the
future, as well.
Culture, history, ideas, information and the
concerns of a period all hide in somebody’s archives waiting to be found, waiting
to be dealt with, waiting to be saved and seen again, waiting to become the learnings
of the ages.
Archivists give society the time it takes to understand
what the present has really been about. As Schopenhauer wrote, “Life must be
lived forward but it can only be understood backward.”
If archivists don’t keep the streams of society
flowing, don’t access them carefully,
historians cannot possibly deal with them when
a new world needs them most.Indeed, on the shoulders of archivists rest the
insights of tomorrow.
In a hectic, connected, technological world where
24 hours of daily information now trumps
the process of understanding, archivists make reflection possible–and if not
now
certainly in times to come. Archivists give
the present the kind of value in the future that few understood when it was
happening. They are our only guarantee that newspaper stories and facebook and
twitter do not become our substitute for history.
They determine how history will be read when
the dust settles and what’s left rises to a new kind of consciousness. Archivists
separate the dramatic from the determinative for us. They enable a people to
realize that the early signs of global warming, ignored and under-reported, were
more important than simply the dating of the storm.
Archivists are the missing link in the
daisy-chain of experience. They bring the designs of activists and the
reflection of researchers into real life contact with the world at large.
They enable a people to eventually transcend
the politics of power and the power of money that regularly obscure and
obstruct the better angels of a generation.
The materials they keep for us, which as
years pass, form the mosaic of an age, expose both the brilliant and the brutal
so that the brutal can be foresworn in times to come and the brilliant
amplified for the sake of the world. Archivists are, at the same time, both the
lighthouse and the hermit’s cave of an era.
And why is that important? They tell the
story of a westerner, excited to be on a safari
for the first time, who force-marched his
native guides through the jungle in ruthless search for game. They made good
time the first two days but on the third morning, the hunter found the guides sitting
on their haunches and doing absolutely nothing to prepare for that day’s
excursion.
"Why aren't we moving
on?" the man demanded. "Because,” the chief guide explained,
“They are waiting for their souls to catch up
with their bodies."
Archivists are the rear-guard of society. They
have the last word about what their era
and its institutions and organizations were
all about, the one they contemplated for years so that our national soul might eventually
someday catch up with our fevered, agitated minds.
To assess the impact and the meaning of the
path we're on is the only thing that makes the search worthwhile and the path
valuable. What you do, as archivists now, to cull the intellectual leavings of
this society and all its parts–to identify and organize and preserve and make
them accessible for generations to come–enables that to happen.
You bring the present into the future. You
give the world, as the Zen master teaches, the eyes they need to see what the
soul is inclined to deny.
No doubt about it: you have a vocation, a
call to your own development and to ours.
Your vocation is basic, essential, necessary to
our own. You make possible what Boethius predicts when he predicts the coming
of the next dream.
You provide the shards and snippets, the
documents and decrees, the pieces of notepaper and the collection of memoirs, the
dulled and rubbled building blocks of the past that are essential to the construction of a
worthy future.
My hope for you is that having followed “the
deepest inclination of your heart,” as the spiritual master directed, having
brought all your own personal skills and continuing commitment to it, as the
rabbi taught, you will find yourself, like the raindrop in the river of your
life, and recognize the immense value of
what you do.
Then here and now at this very conference, may
you realize in doing it what philosophers since Aristotle, humanistic
psychologists of our own time, and all the great spiritual traditions in the
world have always told us comes with having a sense of transcendent purpose, an
awareness of personal call and a recognition of genuine vocation–and may you
know the personal happiness which without doubt, such service to humanity must
surely bring.
Indeed, no doubt about it: if the question is
What is the role of archivists in a changing world? my answer is: just try to
imagine what a soul-less, pathless place it would be without you!
MARAC
April 26, 2013
Erie, PA
No comments:
Post a Comment