The epic constancy of daily service

Gordonstoun wasn’t Kurt Hahn’s first school. When he arrived here in 1934 he had already been a Headmaster for 14 years, at Salem in southern Germany, the school he founded with Prince Max von Baden after the First World War. In the 1950s Hahn was asked what he thought Salem had missed - something that he now had another chance to get right here. In response he said that Salem had failed to emulate ‘…the epic constancy of daily service such as the Cistercians had practised and preached.’ Who were the Cistercians? They were (indeed are) an order of monks, founded by four men in Burgundy in 1098. Before Salem was a school it was a palace for 100 years, but before that it was a Cistercian monastery for over 700 years until closed by Napoleon.

The Cistercians have always emphasised the importance of hard work, self-sufficiencey and service in a successful life, both physically and spiritually – they built their monasteries in terribly harsh, inhospitable places, but their very presence improved those places. In the mediaeval period they were the leaders in forestry, sheep farming, metal-smelting and (perhaps most famously) brewing, so that their existence made the local area more productive and successful. That’s exactly what Hahn wanted his schools to be – wells, springs of service that overflowed into the surrounding community.

But what did he mean by the ‘epic constancy’ of daily service? He didn’t mean epic in the way you might use the word casually about a film for example, but in the traditional sense of long-term, faithful, heroic even. Daily – he doesn’t mean a few big set-piece examples of generous service - he’s making the everyday heroic; those little opportunities to be of service to others that crop up every day become heroic by the fact that we are invited to persist in them, whether or not we get anything out of it for ourselves. Why? Why would we do that? Why put other people first? Well, service is an expression of humility – being humble doesn’t mean being shy, or a pushover or lacking in self-confidence, in fact it’s the opposite. Being humble and putting others first is actually a demonstration that you have the self-confidence not to persistantly compare yourself to others, trying to demonstrate your own superiority. If you can find that confidence then you can approach those around you on their terms, not your own. When I spoke in Chapel about silence last year I quoted the American Thomas Merton. Well, he was a Cistercian monk himself. He said

’Our job is to love others without stopping to enquire whether or not they are worthy. That is not our business, and in fact it is nobody’s business. What we are asked to do is to love, and this love itself will render both ourselves and our neighbours worthy.’

You might be thinking ‘Yes all right, but to me, I’m more important – isn’t that what we’re meant to think’? Well, it’s certainly what we’re encouraged to think; advertising, social media, clothing, food, music, makeup - they all proclaim that individual indulgence is the aim, is admirable and is what we need to be happy in life. It’s all about me, me, me; forget everyone else, that’s their problem. But, these companies and the objects or ideas they’re advertising will never help you to achieve a real sense of happiness – they don’t want to because that’s not their aim. Their aim is to make money, that’s why they exist at all. You know that. As soon as you’ve bought everything they say that you need, it will change to something else, so that you feel the need for that too. Another Cistercian, Abbot Erik Varden, now Bishop of Trondheim in Norway, wrote this:

'‘Think of advertising’s rhetoric of entitlement. How often are we not told we ‘deserve’ this thing or that: an unhealthy dessert, some gadgetry, a nice holiday? ‘You have a right to realize your desires.’ That is the gospel of marketing. If we believe it, only a small step keeps us from a promise more ambitious still, which tells us: ‘You can become what you like.’ This assumption has saturated Western consciousness to such an extent that our society suffers from chronic discontent. Why? Because it cannot be realized. We are told we are supreme masters of our fate. If we like (and have money), we can change the way we live, look and talk."

We are told every day that we are the sole decision makers in our own lives, but of course we’re not – we’re not hermits, we are social animals who live alongside others, so that we are justifiably restricted by family, friends, and responsibilities, but because we’re told that we can do whatever we want, we feel like failures for not doing so. If we want to achieve the much-vaunted sense of satisfaction, fulfilment and achievement we need to find it in something that, firstly, is achievable at all, something that is regular and which acknowledges that we are social animals who live alongside others. Being of service to those around us achieves exactly that. Doing rounds in the morning with a smile, delivering clean laundry to rooms in house or cleaning up after others in the tea room are all examples of selfless jobs that, if approached in the right way, will remind us that we are useful, that we needn’t strive to be perfect, and that our sense of worth lies more in how we interact with others than in trying to construct the perfect person independent of those around us. You are enough – you don’t need a new pair of trainers to give value to your very existence. It’s all summed up in the first line of Psalm 133 – ‘Behold how good and how pleasant it is when brothers dwell in unity’.

So, Gordonstoun has a lot to learn from the Cistercian monks, as Kurt Hahn knew from day one. Their concept of service is epic because it is heroic. They live heroic lives, though you might not immediately think that to look at them. It’s heroic because it’s daily, carrying on over months, years and decades without thought for themselves - ourselves - as individuals, and yet if we participate then we gain from it too; we gain a sense of self-worth that is built on the value we place on those with whom we live and interact, and that is so much more sincere, authentic and rewarding than holding ourselves up to the standard of the latest advertising campaign for jeans or shampoo. To quote Thomas Merton again, ‘Pride makes us artificial, humility makes us authentic.’ The humble you is the real you – authentically and confidently being yourself in your interactions with others rather than constantly comparing yourself to them and presenting a curated façade of what you think they expect to see.

Daily life presents constant opportunities for us all to be of service, but the real question is whether or not you will take them. Will we live out ‘the epic constancy of daily service as practised and preached by the Cistercians’?

Dan McLean, House Parent and Head of Enrichment