Kitchen Duty - With A Difference!

During my first five months in Israel, I lived on a kibbutz (a communal farm) in the northern part of the country. I was there to study Hebrew while I worked half-days to "pay" for my course. It was an interesting volunteer experience. Every week, our work-study schedule would alternate, from mornings to afternoons. Like all the members of the Kibbutz, once or twice a month we students had kitchen duty, either preparing food, washing dishes, setting and clearing tables or serving - pushing large aluminum carts laden with steaming serving dishes into the dining room and putting them on the dining tables. All kibbutz members - whatever jobs they normally did - shared in these routine kitchen tasks... a sign of equality in their status-less society. The purpose of this was to keep all grounded: No one could be viewed as superior or inferior if we all took turns serving each other.

So I find it interesting that this same principle applies in the Rule of Benedict, for the same reason. In a Benedictine community all share in cooking and serving food - and washing up. But there are some big differences. When the weekly rotation changes every Saturday, "Both the one who is ending service and the one who is about to begin are to wash the feet of everyone." (Italics mine.) Then the next day, Sunday, immediately after morning prayer, those about to begin their week of kitchen service ask for the community to pray for them, and they do - commissioning them for this task of service.

The commissioning - as well as the humbling (having to wash everyone's feet) - elevate the daily drudgery of kitchen service, reminding both the servers and the community that they are following in the footsteps of Jesus, who came not to be served but to serve. They are imitating him in the most humbling of tasks - washing the feet of the others - as they do in the preparing of food, thinking perhaps of the time that Jesus had prepared food (fish and bread) for his disciples.

Benedict's goal is also to create a "classless" monastic community. And then he goes a step further. As well as commissioning the workers, he elevates the utensils in the kitchen, by considering them - as well as all the other tools in the monastery - to be just as sacred as the vessels on the altar.

"Ora et labora" (prayer and work)... Both are equally "holy."