Profession and Discipline

In the late 1980's I spent two days in a Benedictine monastery, Ampleforth Abbey, in Yorkshire. I was interested in having that experience because I had come to conclude that between the Nicene Creed and the Protestant Reformation, the spiritual mission of Christianity had had its purest manifestation in the work of the monasteries, and in the music that monasteries as well as cathedrals and parish churches had incubated. So I wanted to see one for myself.

From the 4th century on, as the Church in Europe went about its compromises and politics in a world too often marked by poverty and injustice and personal barbarism and wars, the monks wrote, studied and sang every day in their archipelago of stone-clad retreats all over the original Western continent. The medieval mystics in particular, who kept alive a lineage of spiritual thought originally fed by the desert anchorites and the great theologians like Augustine, would have been inconceivable without the monastic infrastructure.

After Gutenberg's press and Martin Luther, every believer was able and authorized, and eventually free, to learn and to develop his (and eventually her) own form of commitment to the truth of what Jesus Christ had taught and demonstrated. After the Reformation, the great Christian diaspora of faith and methods of worship, far from just dividing a church that had itself never been sacrosanct, would fertilize minds and diversify theology in ways that democratized what it means to believe in a God who "loves each of us, as if there were only one of us," as Augustine put it .

Because the unbelieving advocates of a secular but tamer age now dismiss faith as archaic or irrational, citing the most fanatic elements as some sort of proof of the irrationality of all who believe (as if fanatics in any community somehow delegimate everyone else), those of us who haven't given up the spiritual quest are in a certain sense secular monks. We have to balance our checkbooks, commute to work, and pay our taxes, but we carry on the work of studying and praying and considering what we really believe -- and we try to practice it. Since the world gives us little outward reinforcement, particularly if we are not attracted to church-going for its own sake, those of us who have glimpsed monastic devotion might say of it what Gandhi said of the prisons that the British regularly threw him into: "Jail is a beautiful garden." New ideas, even a new understanding, could grow there. The world becomes more legible with a little distance from it.

I chose Ampleforth because a monk there in the postwar period had been a prolific spiritual writer, and the Dalai Lama had even come to visit him there. I thought there might be a better chance of a spiritual atmosphere. But what I saw reminded me more of life at a rural military post: the simplicity of its people and the regimentation of the day -- in a word, discipline (which had never been my forte, much less rising before dawn for a cold shower). Yet I also saw that the exoskeleton of that discipline offered a kind of liberation. Thought was not distracted by the thousands of mundane decisions that the individual has to make in daily personal life on one's own. The outer day is programmed, and so the inner day has opportunity to bloom -- if it does. But that's your decision. (The Christian band "Dave's Son" has a lovely song about that, called "What Makes You Bloom." You can hear it on Rhapsody: http://www.rhapsody.com/daves-son/daves-son)

Whenever a young person decides to make a monastic profession, one might reasonably expect to see a little evidence of this blooming. The prospect of "living in the truth" (as Vaclev Havel called the decision to turn away from the lies of material oppression) would be cause for lifting your gaze and perhaps also your heart. That seems to have been present in the ceremony captured in the video below.

The poet Robinson Jeffers, who lived on the Big Sur coastline in the mid-20th century, said that "in wildness is the preservation of the world." A spiritual innovator of the 19th century, Mary Baker Eddy, defined wilderness as "the vestibule in which the material sense of things disappears, and spiritual sense unfolds the great facts of existence." Monasteries are one of those vestibules. It is a civilized mission.

A poem by William Bronk

FOR ANY SPEAKERS

Oh, God, who in the night-quiet called
Samuel to you, call us then too
and in the day-noise call that, hearing you,
we may more plainly say the nameless name.

- in Life Supports: New and Collected Poems,
North Point Press, 1981