Chapter 26. Serious Faults
A brother guilty of a serious fault is to be excluded from both the table and the oratory. No other brother should associate or converse with him at all. He will work alone at the tasks assigned to him, living continually in sorrow and penance, pondering that fearful judgment of the Apostle: Such a man is handed over for the destruction of his flesh that his spirit may be saved on the day of the Lord (I Cor 5:5). Let him take his food alone in an amount and at a time the abbot considers appropriate for him. He should not be blessed by anyone passing by, nor should the food that is given him be blessed.
Holy hopping hoards of hell!
Okay, I'll calm down and try to make something out of this. I knew this chapter was coming, and was hoping some brave soul would volunteer to take it, but here it is the 2nd day of July and it's up to me. In a monastic setting, the effects of this would be devastating to be so cut off from your community.
Lay Cistercians? Would we do that? If we did, who would make such a decision? The Abbot of the monastery? Our local group leader? I see the value of this chapter for monastic life. I also see that if it is applied in Lay Cistercian life that a revolution could easily occur. Feel free to disagree, but before we start pointing out those little specs in the eye of someone else, we'd better pull that log out of our own.
With that said, let's think about group meetings that are disrupted by one person, or the person who never comes, but when they do show up, are the final authority of everything that ever was. What about those who say they are Lay Cistercians but simply can't be bothered with coming to one single meeting? At some point we may have to make some rules that say "you don't show up once in a years time, you are no longer part of us."
These are not decisions to be made by one person, they should be made by the entire community.
May God bring us altogether to everlasting life.
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