Keeping Things To Code

As I'm wont to do in my downtime, I indulge the crazy ideas that go through my mind from time to time. The google du jour was "rocket" stoves--super efficient woodstoves popular in the Netherlands that burn small branches and sticks at high temps with little to no smoke and store the thermal mass in a radiator-type fashion.

As I was reading through the threads on various permaculture and off-grid prepper message boards of people who have attempted to build one, the topic of building codes came up--what if you built one of these things and then decided to sell your house? What if it was a project done without a permit? Were safety concerns taken into consideration, (ie, taking precautions to not burn your house down)? Would such an addition void your home insurance? Etc.

Most of the people on these boards are DIY-tinkerer types that dismiss these kinds of practical concerns ("you probably don't need a permit") or write them off as too establishment ("fat-cat municipalities looking to get their piece of the pie"). You see this a lot in the so-called "tiny-house movement"--people who see code enforcers as the enemy and try to skirt laws and tax assessments by putting their house on a flatbed trailer, for instance, or classifying it as a shed and living in it under the radar.

Being the DIY type and having always fantasized about building my own house (eventually settling for trying my hand at living the tiny life by converting a schoolbus to live in), I know where they are coming from. But as I get older (and arguably less-idealistic) I've come to appreciate the need for safety and inspection codes, permits, and work done by licensed, bonded, and insured contractors, and have accepted that, barring a few exceptions, they are in place for good reason.

Would you want someone building your house who watched some videos on carpentry and electrical work on Youtube and learns by trial and error? Would you take medical advise from someone who read on the internet that lemon juice and ginger can cure a malignant tumor?

And yet when it comes to our spiritual lives, we often take a DIY approach or put our souls in the care of self-appointed gurus. And how much more valuable are our souls than a house or a physical body?

Now, I think there is a place for personal discernment, but that for the majority of people it is most fruitful within an established framework or "moral code." The mind is simply too self-serving, too deceptive, to be left to its own devices.

In the first chapter of his Rule, St. Benedict, the father of Western Monasticism, lays the foundation for the spiritual life of those following in the Way through strong admonition and warning. He describes four types of monks.

"The first kind are the Cenobites:
those who live in monasteries
and serve under a rule and an Abbot."

Notice the importance of serving under two things: a rule (a prescribed set of established spiritual and practical ordinances) and an Abbot (an abba, a spiritual father entrusted with the welfare of those in his care).

In the next passage, he describes those who have been called by God (and not all are) to the desert to enter into spiritual battle alone. Note that these are men and women who have been tried and matured in their vocation, and are permitted only after a "long probation" in a monastery, to do so. They have been strengthened by the rule and their years of training to undertake what is ahead, and only then never apart from God's grace.




"The second kind are the Anchorites or Hermits:
those who,
no longer in the first fervor of their reformation,
but after long probation in a monastery,
having learned by the help of many brethren
how to fight against the devil,
go out well armed from the ranks of the community
to the solitary combat of the desert.
They are able now,
with no help save from God,
to fight single-handed against the vices of the flesh
and their own evil thoughts."


The third and fourth types of monks are wayward, lax, and moved by their own wills and notions. They detest being subject to a rule, but prefer their own way of doing things. Benedict uses strong language to describe them, and for good reason--they are not to be emulated. 

"The third kind of monks, a detestable kind, are the Sarabaites.
These, not having been tested,
as gold in the furnace (Wis. 3:6),
by any rule or by the lessons of experience,
are as soft as lead.
In their works they still keep faith with the world,
so that their tonsure marks them as liars before God.
They live in twos or threes, or even singly,
without a shepherd,
in their own sheepfolds and not in the Lord's.
Their law is the desire for self-gratification:
whatever enters their mind or appeals to them,
that they call holy;
what they dislike, they regard as unlawful.

The fourth kind of monks are those called Gyrovagues.
These spend their whole lives tramping from province to province,
staying as guests in different monasteries
for three or four days at a time.
Always on the move, with no stability,
they indulge their own wills
and succumb to the allurements of gluttony,
and are in every way worse than the Sarabaites.
Of the miserable conduct of all such
it is better to be silent than to speak." 


Now, 99% of us are not monks, but Benedict's admonitions still have a lot to teach us as laypeople.

We need the support of a sacramental community bound by common purpose beyond that of self-gratification. The early Christians(as recounted in the Book of Acts) lived in this kind of spiritual brotherhood, selling their property and sharing all in common, breaking bread and praying together.

We need bonafide, trustworthy teachers and spiritual fathers. Jesus made his teaching and salvation accessible to all, but entrusted the teaching authority to the Twelve. We need only to look at the early heresies that emerged (and continue to emerge today) to see why this safeguarding of Diving Revelation was important. Those who spurn teaching and shun authority should be held suspect.

We benefit from a time-tested and established rule or code of conduct, as Chesterton called "the walls of a playground," the way marriage vows hedge in a couple during those difficult periods of a marriage, the way Odysseus commanded his crew to tie him to the ship mast to keep him from certain death at the hands of the sweet-singing sirens.

Without these, the tendency to follow our own ways and tastes is too strong, and we are left vulnerable to the temptations of the Devil. We are like golfers trying to go head to head with Tiger Woods in a PGA championship by practicing our strokes based on what we think is right. Tiger Woods was not self-taught. he learned from a master golfer, as most good golfers too. Bishop Robert Barron said it better than I can, "If you swing the golf club the wrong way enough times, you become a bad golfer, that is to say, someone habitually incapable of hitting the ball straight and far. And if you swing the club correctly enough times, you become a good golfer, someone habitually given to hitting the ball straight and far."

No one forays into the wilderness without a map and compass and a guide. If we are honest, we are simply too inexperienced, novices in the spiritual life, to be free climbing crags alone without belay, or venturing into the territory of wolves without the skills necessary for survival. As the modern-day anchorite Fr. Lazarus Al-Anthony said in a rare interview in his desert hermitage in Egypt: "If I take my eyes off Jesus for one moment out here, I am alone, and am utterly lost."