A promise to meet life head on
Cassian wrote that Abba John, the leader of a great monastery, went to Abba Paesius who had been living for forty years very far off 
in the desert. As John was very fond of Paesius and could therefore speak freely to him, John said to him, “What good have you done by living here in retreat so long and not being easily disturbed by anyone?” And Abba Paesius said, “Since I have lived in solitude, the sun has never seen me eating.” Abba John said to him, “As for me, as long as I have lived in community, the sun has never seen me angry.”
It is easy to be even-tempered in private, in other words. It is easy to be virtuous alone. It is easy to be strong when untried. It is easy to win when there is nothing to endure. It is also easy to be superficial and self-centered and characterless. It is also easy to run from what I may most need to confront in life if I am ever to be whole. Monastic stability, you see, is concerned more with depth than with comfort.
Benedictine stability is a promise to meet life head on. It deals directly with centeredness, commitment, and relationships.
Stability, you see, is essential to the ongoing revelation of the many faces of God in my life. Someday, somehow, I have to see a thing through to the end or I will never come to know what I was meant to find there, and I will never come to recognize the face of God that is hidden there, and I will never come to be all that I could be there.
Stability is what gives me time in life, time for God and time for others. If I rush from job to job and city to city and relationship to relationship, I never discover all the aspects of each. I never find the rhythm of life. I never touch all the dimensions of anything. I never get stretched beyond myself. I never become bonded to others. And alienation sets in.
Mobility, then, is not the ultimate enemy of stability, alienation is. When nothing touches me deeply enough to change me, nothing can touch me at all. I learn to say the proper words, perhaps, but I never learn the grace that comes from anger suffered but not spat out, or pain borne and not denied, or love learned and expressed. I go through life on fast speed but numb.
Stability, the willingness to continue to grow where I am, ironically, is the ground of conversion, the willingness to be changed. With these people, in this place, at this time I dedicate myself to rebirth and growth and maturity, both spiritual and psychological. With the help of these others, I can commit myself to the faithfulness of a God who is unpredictable.
Is stability easy? Not on your life. But the Desert Monastics told us, “It is by warfare that the soul makes progress.” And if, by living as responsible members of the human community, we can come to the point where “the sun never sees our anger,” then we will have come to fullness of life.
—from Wisdom Distilled from the Daily (HarperOne), by Joan Chittister
