more on monks

I was thinking of writing an essay on monks, similar to the series of five essays on being black in America written recently by Abdul-Walid.  I don’t think I could muster five essays on the subject, but you never know.  This used to be a subject of great interest to me.  Mostly because as a young person I had various ‘spiritual experiences’ that led me to investigate a particular direction.  Even before that, as a child I think I was ear-marked by the nuns for the religious life. I grew up Catholic, I was gentle and brainy, and I liked to pray, but then a sudden growth spurt invited various forms of sexual abuse, which kind of skewed my life away from the convent.  Not that sexual experience is a barrier to the convent.  It isn’t, but in my case it was.

Once I emerged from that maelstrom into young adulthood, I went on to serve as a ‘lay minister’ (no pun intended), and took communion to the shut-ins, etcetera, throughout my twenties, reading scripture from the pulpit in church on Sundays, taking spiritual direction from the Jesuits (the Graduate Theological Union is in our neighborhood), teaching various classes in the parish, and eventually being recruited by local prelates for study at the GTU, which I did in my early thirties, earning a master’s degree in theology, and meeting a lot of interesting people.  Throughout all of these years, my husband G and I tried unsuccessfully to produce offspring, which was a source of great sorrow to me.  I did the pastoral side of my theological work in the area of grieving.

One of the first things I learned at GTU is that there were lots of people living lives of dedication to various ideals: truth, beauty, God, goodness, Love, etcetera, and that some of them took vows publically to become ministers, nuns, priests, monks.  They took vows, but as I learned at GTU, no one can take a vow to live something if they are not already living it in their daily lives.  In other words, when people take a vow of celibacy, they have to be living celibate lives already.  You can’t take a vow and start living celibately the next day.  So, that showed me that the most important thing is the way we live our lives, not whether we go through a ceremony or join an organization.  Those latter things are important, too, but not AS important as the former. 

Also, I became aware that many lay people were living lives of Intent.  They had the intention to be of service,...

...to be celibate (the better to be available to love and serve God and other people, or to seek the ability to do so), to seek truth, etcetera.  Hey, it turns out I was one of those people!  That’s why I was there.  I realized that people like me had made internal vows, not public ones. 

This led me to my next realization: the vowed life lived in community is a lifestyle choice.  Rather than choosing marriage or single life lived in the world, some people choose to live within a vowed community: the Jesuits, the Franciscans, the Benedictines, the Carmelites are all Catholic examples of vowed communities. One can’t live in such a community out of the sheer love of God.  There has to be a compatibility of the lifestyle.  Love of God, Truth, Beauty, etcetera, can be lived anywhere.  Almost as if proof of that, there are a myriad varieties of spiritual communities and spiritual lifestyles in the world.

For example, even in

America

, there are still the Amish and the Mennonite communities, who expect their young people to make a choice and take vows to live a certain lifestyle. When all is said and done that lifestyle consists in living together in extended families, working together and praying together.  This pattern is repeated in both Catholic and Tibetan monasteries, except that the residents are celibate: these are the people we usually think of as monks.  But there are other, non-community-based monastic lifestyles.

There are the hermit traditions of the west and east. Examples that spring to mind are: Anthony of Egypt, Jerome, Julian of Norwich in the west. Thoreau is another non-religious example.  In the East, Daoism and Hinduism maintain hermit traditions.  Yet the truth is that some of these hermits, like Jerome and Thoreau, only lived that lifestyle briefly, ie for a few years.  Others, like Anthony, and many of the hermits of

India

, lived in loosely structured colonies of hermits. Julian of Norwich was petitioned daily by those seeking her guidance, and this is another historically common kind of hermit experience, in which the hermit is located just off the main road, and has many visitors. Stone House is an example from

China

.

And there are other kinds of solitary monks. For example, I have a friend who is a Buddhist nun.  She lived for sixteen years in a monastery in

Asia

, and now lives independently in

Berkeley

.  This is quite normal in the Buddhist tradition.  There is some period of time spent living in community.  Vows are taken and then the monk or nun is free to choose their lifestyle. The community aspect is not quite as much stressed as in the west.  In Daoism, for example, solitude is quite central.  But as we have seen with Julian of Norwich, even the most ‘solitary’ monks have had a great deal of contact with people, especially seekers who come to them for guidance.

One of the things I learned in theology school was the value of reaching out beyond my own tradition to learn more about the mystery and beauty of the incarnation of the Divine.  I started moving in non-Christian circles, continuing my education in God.  I won’t bore you with all the details.  As an extension of my former pastoral ministry to the sick and aging, I went on to study Chinese medicine after theology school (after working for a while in the church – for money, as distinguished from my previous work, which was for free), and this exploration of the Chinese terrain introduced me to Daoism.  I also met a saint from

India

, and traveled there several times during the 1990’s.  My last trip was 2003.  So I became involved in traditions from another part of the world. 

One thing I learned from these travels, is that the vowed life of the monk is – and formerly was, even moreso – very common in the east, just as it was in medieval

Europe

.  I met people living this lifestyle, and this inspired me to read more about them, too.  For example, in Learning from Ladakh, I read that most of the  younger sons and daughters of these high-altitude families become monks and nuns. This was true in medieval

Europe

as well: the unmarriagable offspring, whether for economic or other reasons, often entered the monastery.  In Ladakh, they spend a number of years undergoing ‘formation’ (a Catholic term) in a large monastery, and then return to their family’s farms, to live in a little hut and work the land as a celibate, vowed monk or nun. 

In India there are sadhus who live beside the river in a little hut, or in a cave (I’ve met one of these), or who take up the wandering life, spending no more than three days in any given place (I’ve met one of these, a most remarkable man).  They are seeking some transcendent experience within themselves, while it seems as if the Tibetan monk seeks to be a support to their society.  The Christian monastics are very varied in their goals: some seek a relationship with God which they see as potentially supportive to the world (these are called ‘contemplatives’), others seek more visible and tangible means of service to humanity, but are also rooted in the relationship with God (these are called ‘actives’).  The Indian spiritual group with whom I am involved right now hold high ideals of service and of daily spiritual practice.  I am very impressed by these people, and I know they have made vows in their hearts, they are ‘intending’ their lives, not living entirely ‘haphazardly,’ (to borrow a word from Dave who wrote a comment on this topic.  More on the possibilities of ‘haphazardness’ in relation to monkishness in the next post.)

This leads us to another central question about the vocation of monk, whether in or outside of an ‘intentional community.’  Do monks and nuns have personal issues they are working on?  Do they have character defects, problems, etc, or are they all uniformly good and pure?  We’d like to think that they are all as good and wise as Elder Zossima in The Brothers Karamazov, but in reality they have much the same challenges as we do.  Some have lived rather wild lives before entering (or founding) their orders:

St Augustine

, St. Francis of

Assisi

, Thomas Merton, Ignatius of Loyola spring to mind.  Do some monks overeat or undereat?  Yes.  Is sexuality over and done with for them?  Not usually.  Do they love all uniformly?  No.  But the point is, they are trying to.  They are intending it, and they are ‘cultivating themselves’ (to borrow a daoist term), in an attempt to grow into a person of larger perspective (hence able to love more), and of freer character (not chained to bad habits that drag them down).

Here we’ve taken a brief overview of monkhood from the religious perspective, which is one that dominates our thinking about monks.  In my next post, I’d like to consider in more depth what I’m calling ‘secular monks’ for want of a better term.  I’ll be referring a bit to a post found in ‘The Hermitary.’

Comments

[kasturi]

Hi Kurt,

I've enjoyed visiting your weblog a happening.

Thanks for your comment. I see you posted it to my 'more not native fruit' blog. That is my 'invention' to try to prevent long-winded blogs on this page. I'm not sure it's working. I had hoped people would hit the return key and come back here to post.

Anyway, thanks for your suggestion. I think someone else just recently recommended the Rougeau book to me. I'll have to check it out.

Yes, I also learned about the tough side of spiritual community-life during my time spent at an ashram in India. Institutional monasticism is not for wimps! (wimps like me, I might add)

[kurt via kasturi]

This post calls to mind a novel I read a few years back I suspect you might enjoy. It's called All We Know of Heaven, by a Canadian monk named Remy Rougeau (I think I've got that right). It's about the spiritual journey of a novice trappist and his somewhat rude awakening to the challenges of life in a spiritual community--one that's beset with many of the same difficulties we encounter as lay people, and perhaps even magnified by the quirkiness, and even selfishness, of monastic types. He peels back the romance of monasticism to discover its human, flawed, and often humourous heart.

[rachel via kasturi]

I found my way here via cassandrapages and am enjoying this post tremendously.
Have you read Mary Rose O'Reilly's "The Barn at the End of the World"? She is a Quaker Buddhist sheep-farmer who once thought she would become a Catholic nun (and pursued her novitiate, but ultimately didn't take holy orders) who writes beautifully about vows, monasticism, and the challenges of ordinary practice.

[kasturi]

Rachel,

Thank you so much for visiting and posting to my blog. I moved your comment from where it was (it's too complicated even to explain, just trust me) and I want to make a note that you can be reached at http://velveteenrabbi.blogs.com/

I haven't read the book by Mary Rose O'Reilly, but she sounds like someone I'd like, and I love her title: The Barn at the End of the World. The spiritual teacher I now follow started her spiritual ministry in a barn, as a matter of fact.

I look forward to further back-and-forth between your weblog and mine. Additional thanks, by the way, to Cassandra Pages.

Best, Kasturi (aka Karen)