Rules of Life: A Return to Tradition

Christ in the Desert, is a monastery in New Mexico that once was struggling as hard as most religious institutions in this modern age. In more recent years, they’ve been blessed with more vocations than they can easily handle but they’ve been able so far to admit all serious applicants who seem to have a valid calling to the monastic life. They’ve started a new house in the Archdiocese of Chicago and they’ve sent several monks to help St. Benedict’s Abbey, a once struggling and now recovering monastery in Pietersburg, South Africa. Now, the monks of Christ in the Desert have tentative plans to set up a monastery for Vietnamese monks.

When Abbot Philip visited South Africa recently, he wrote a newsletter in which he discussed the liturgy of the hours and the blessings he saw coming to a Benedictine monastery which returned to the one-week psalter from the four-week psalter prayed by far too many houses in recent decades. (See the newsletter at return to tradition.) That four-week psalter is appropriate for pastors or other priests in the world, for members of active orders (such as teaching orders), and for the laity, but the Rule of St. Benedict mandates the much more demanding one-week psalter. Praying all 150 psalms each week, along with hymns, antipons, readings, intercessionary prayers, and other prayers requires the monks to spend at least 3 hours a day in just that liturgy of the hours. (See General Instructions for Liturgy of the Hours for the general instructions for praying the Liturgy of the Hours. For those interested in the history of the Liturgy of the Hours, here’s an Essay on Historical Development.)

In addition to praying the Liturgy of the Hours in community, Benedictines have to celebrate daily Mass, more elaborate than the daily Mass at a parish. They also have to earn a living, maintain their property, manage their community, and so forth. It’s not an easy life and not a life for someone like me who has a calling to specific work — this was a matter I discussed with the superior of St. Mary’s more than 15 years ago and he confirmed a monk has to have a calling to that life and not to a specific work. Not an easy life but few worthwhile lives are. My current life is harder than a monk’s life in some ways and easier in others.

Life in a monastery is for those who are called and who respond wholeheartedly. Despite the uniformity in their clothing and their schedules, monks are more free to develop their God-given personalities than we who live in the outside, where we modern human beings have maintained peace and some measure of coherence in our societies for centuries by way of a frightening uniformity of opinion and of taste. The gods of the marketplace have digested our innards so that there can be no high barriers between public and private life.

The monastic rules reflect a practical, hard-earned wisdom that can handle the gods of the marketplaces as well as the gods of disorder who rule when barbarians storm the cities of man — though there is still the price to be paid for pursuing justice in an age that glorifies the expedient. During very bad times, monasteries have protected the treasures of not only Christian thought and liturgy but also those of practical knowledge in engineering and agriculture and even the treasures of secular literature and pagan philosophy. We may well be entering an era when monasteries will once again act as storehouses for many human treasures which are not directly convertible into gold.

Rules of Life: The Benedictine Life

I’d considered the possibility of a call into monastic life about 15 years ago. I was attracted to many aspects of the life but was also quite aware that the monastic life wasn’t what many imagine it to be. There’s quiet but it’s sometimes an external quiet that makes the inner struggles all the louder. And even the best of monasteries can go through turmoil such that the external quiet also disappears. The world follows you into the cloister.

On the whole, there’s order in Benedictine monasteries, those that survive for more than a few years, but that order can itself be disturbing. We modern men don’t deal well with the death of the self by humility and discipline even when we know that death leads to our rebirth in a Christ-like form. Even the most highly motivated young monk has to struggle to accept the rules of a life he’s not yet made his own. There’s maybe a chance for personal study but only after years of studying Latin and chant, the Rule of St. Benedict and the lives of Benedictine saints. There’s maybe a chance to carve out one’s own niche in the way of a woodworker or ale-brewer or bee-keeper if study is of little interest, but that also will be years in the future. Until then, you do humbler work to support the established routines of the monastery.

If things work out for me, I’d like to start a house of studies as a Benedictine oblate community. And I’d like to start it near, or even proximate to, a good monastery such as St. Mary’s Monastery in Petersham, MA. It seems to me to be a potentially effective way to continue my efforts to understand God’s Creation in light of Christian revelation. This may not ever happen. I might spend the rest of my life feeling the frustrations of being in a place and a situation which are not mine.

Sometimes, devout and traditional Catholic that I am, I feel I’d like to live near an Amish or Mennonite community. There are lessons in the Rule of St. Benedict which apply to the life of Christian laymen in a form much mitigated from the monastic original. The Amish and some Mennonites live as if they were following a rule of life for laity based upon the Rule of St. Benedict. Wendell Berry. farmer and poet and essayist, writes of morally proper lives of farmers as if he’d studied the Rule of St. Benedict and absorbed its wisdom so deeply that he can adjust it to different circumstances as a matter of course. Then again, a morally well-ordered life is what it is, whether it comes from a Benedictine tradition or the agrarian traditions of Kentucky.

Visiting a Region of Peace

Fourteen years ago, I’d made my break with the corporate world, forced by a bit of incompetence in my last position to be sure. Barely escaping bankruptcy because of a drop in real estate values, I’d moved up to Petersham, MA, renting a small apartment in an antique farmhouse owned by a young couple. I chose to rent that apartment because it was a 5 to 10 minute walk from the brother-sister Benedictine communities of St. Mary’s Monastery and the Priory of St. Scholastica. I’d been visiting those communities on occasional weekends for a year or so.

After moving to Petersham, I participated in the prayer and worship of those Benedictine communities as a lay visitor. I attended Lauds some days (at 6:00AM or so), Vespers most days (at 6PM or so), and daily Mass often. I also attended Sunday Mass at St. Mary’s rather than going to one of the parish churches in Athol — there was a mission church in Petersham with no resident priest and a limited Mass schedule.

When I had to leave Petersham, I fell away from the practice of my Catholic faith for nearly nine years. About five years ago, I began my slow return to practice of my faith and have now become very active in my parish.

Almost two years ago, I returned for a visit to St. Mary’s, attending Mass with a friend but that was more of a field trip and included a long hike through the Harvard University forest a little down the road from St. Mary’s.

About a month ago, I went up with some other friends and had a very unusual experience. The Superior is a Visitor for the Subiaco Congregation of the Benedictines and goes to inspect monasteries in various places around this globe but most of the monks stay put most of the time. After all, they even take a vow of stability. Yet, my friends and I arrived to find that all but one of the monks had left for a visit to a relatively new monastery of their congregation that was near Chicago. A parish priest came in and celebrated a very nice Mass but it was a regular new Mass in English. We’d gone up to see that new Mass celebrated with Gregorian chant in Latin. But we didn’t give up. We returned for Vespers just about a week ago as I write. And we stayed for Compline.