When they travel, some people collect tea towels. I collect monasteries.
Throughout my career, I’ve always been fascinated by the monastic impulse.
The first monks were “desert fathers,” led by St. Anthony in 270 AD who escaped to an isolated, highly inhospitable Egyptian desert to commune with God. I’ve hiked up to the mountain cave near the Red Sea where Anthony spent most of his days, stood on the ledge and gazed out at the barren wilderness. I’ve also visited St. Catherine’s monastery in the desert at the base of Mt. Sinai.
What mix of devotion, adventure and pure grit propelled men and women to turn their backs on society and pursue a physically meager but spiritually rich life?
The Monastic Impulse
A few weeks ago in Ireland, I visited some of the oldest monasteries in Europe.
We often visualize a monastery as medieval monks’ antiphonally chanting in stone cold Gothic churches, while Brother Cadfael puzzles over a mystery in the background. But centuries before the Rule of St. Benedict became the standardized monastic path of poverty, chastity and obedience in the 11th-13th centuries (and, it must be said, eventually was compromised by inordinate monastic wealth and immorality), Irish monks pioneered a different way.
We visited Clonmacnoise, founded in 544 AD. As I gazed across the River Shannon along which it is built, the cold wind whipping around me, I imagined an Irish leather-skinned currach fighting against the wind to dock. Scholars from all over Europe came to study here. It became a major European center of learning, craftsmanship, and trade by the 9th century.
After St. Patrick introduced Christianity in the 5th century, dedicated monks built many such communities. They lived in primitive beehive huts that look like stone igloos, worshipped in a simple church, and eventually created tall round towers distinctive to Irish monastic communities.
Worldwide attention was drawn to the well-preserved beehive huts of the Irish monastery on Skellig Michael, an island off Ireland’s western coast, in Star Wars—The Last Jedi. Watch this trailer for amazing views of this ancient monastery.
After the fall of the Roman Empire, places like Clonmacnoise kept the flame of learning alive. Monks copied manuscripts that would otherwise have been lost forever. Eventually Irish monks exploded outward, founding still-famous monasteries on Iona (an island off western Scotland), Lindisfarne (an island off northern England).
I already had both in my collection—I had visited Lindisfarne many years ago and spent a week studying and worshipping at the abbey on Iona.
Now I was walking the home turf of their founders.
One of my heroes is St. Columba, who was born into a royal family but walked away from his wealth and position to brave the sea crossing to Iona. As soon as they landed, he made his monks burn their boats so they would not be tempted to return to Ireland. From such a gusty beginning, Iona became the prototype for monasteries all over Scotland, England and eventually central Europe as well.
Thomas Cahill in How the Irish Saved Civilization writes
Wherever they went the Irish brought with them their books, many unseen in Europe for centuries and tied to their waists as signs of triumph, just a s Irish heroes had once tied to their waists their enemies’ heads. Wherever they went they brought their love of learning and their skills in bookmaking. In the bays and valleys of their exile, they reestablished literacy and breathed new life into the exhausted literary culture of Europe.And that is how the Irish saved civilization.
The Monastic Impulse Today
The “Marks of a New Monasticism” listed below are how monastic life is reinvigorated and lived out in intentional communities today. Check out more detailed descriptions in the book New Monasticism:
- Relocation to the abandoned places of empire.
- Sharing economic resources with fellow community members and the needy among us.
- Hospitality to the stranger.
- Lament for racial divisions with the church and our communities, combined with the active pursuit of a just reconciliation.
- Humble submission to Christ’s body, the church.
- Intentional formation in the way of Christ and rule of the community, along the lines of the old novitiate.
- Nurturing common life among members of an intentional community.
- Support for celibate singles alongside monogamous married couples and their children.
- Geographical proximity to community members who share a common rule of life.
- Care for the plot of god’s earth given to us, along with support of our local economies.
- Peacemaking in the midst of violence, and conflict resolution within communities along the lines of Matthew 18:15-20.
- Commitment to a disciplined contemplative life.
I see three themes that correspond to the original monastic ideal.
#1 monastic impulse: Intentional Community
- Sharing economic resources with fellow community members and the needy among us.
- Nurturing common life among members of an intentional community.
- Support for celibate singles alongside monogamous married couples and their children.
- Geographical proximity to community members who share a common rule of life.
The genius and power of monastic life is the clear New Testament commitment to life radically lived together in community. We individualistic Americans little appreciate how deep our experience of community—or the lack of it—impacts our spiritual lives.
Our worldviews are so conditioned by the Enlightenment ideal of the autonomous individual, we find it hard to even imagine submitting our individual impulses or preferences to a larger community. Evangelicals often express this individualist urge as our “personal relationship” with Jesus. While Jesus does indeed know and love us personally, our relationship with him is wholistic, mediated through Jesus’ own Body and relationships with others within that Body, the church.
How do we fight against Christian forms of consumerism, with its powerful 11th commandment: “Thou shalt always get what you want, when you want it.” To sublimate personal preferences in obedience to a larger community is the epitome of counter-cultural living today.
We need a “common rule of life”—as forbidding as this sounds to modern ears.
A church I served where small groups grew to include 80% of the worshipping congregation had four simple expectations we called our “group DNA” but could have been our “rule of life:” study Scripture together, share life together (depend on each other in practical ways), help each other to discover and use our spiritual gifts, and find ways to share God’s love with people around us.
My experience is people gain far more from small groups that are intentionally focused on a “common rule” than when groups are encouraged to do their own thing.
#2 monastic impulse: Spiritual Discipline
- Humble submission to Christ’s body, the church.
- Intentional formation in the way of Christ and rule of the community, along the lines of the old novitiate.
- Commitment to a disciplined contemplative life.
Here again we find something hard for American individualists—”humble submission.” Whether it is submission to the church, to a community rule, or to a disciplined contemplative life, none come easily to me. It is so much more than having individual devotions.
I am particularly intrigued by “Intentional formation in the way of Christ and rule of the community, along the lines of the old novitiate.”
Irish monastic communities were not as regimented as the later medieval orders who closely followed the Rule of St. Benedict. But the monastic impulse understands that a novitiate (a beginner) needs accountability because discipleship is not primarily knowing ideas, but following a “way,” a way of life given by Jesus. They provided that accountability.
#3 monastic impulse (growing out of the first two): Serving Poor and Broken People
- Relocation to the abandoned places of empire.
- Hospitality to the stranger.
- Lament for racial divisions with the church and our communities, combined with the active pursuit of a just reconciliation.
- Care for the plot of god’s earth given to us, along with support of our local economies.
- Peacemaking in the midst of violence, and conflict resolution within communities along the lines of Matthew 18:15-20.
The authenticity of Christian faith rises or falls exactly here.
Many Americans today say they like Jesus but have absolutely no interest in Jesus’ church. Even secular people know that authentic followers of Jesus will be doing the kinds of things on this list.
The monastic impulse to retreat to the “margins” of society and focus on seeking God (not changing society), ended up changing everything, including “saving civilization” throughout the European Dark Ages.
Could the same happen today?
Many evangelicals decry that the institutional church has been pushed to the margins and lost its favored position in American culture. But perhaps that’s exactly where we need to be to recapture genuine faithfulness.
Thomas Cahill certainly does not write as a Christian, but he captures the monastic impulse of living on the margins on the final page of How the Irish Saved Civilization
[The] future may be germinating today not in a boardroom in London or an office in Washington or a bank in Tokyo, but in some antic outpost or other—a kindly British orphanage in the grim foothills of Peru, a house for the dying in a back street in Calcutta run by a fiercely single-minded Albanian nun, an easygoing French medical team at the starving edge of the Sahel, a mission to Somalia by Irish social workers who remember their own Great Hunger, a nursery program to assist convict-mothers at a New York prison—in some unheralded corner where a great-hearted human being is committed to loving outcasts in an extraordinary way.
The concept I found most striking (at least to begin with) is the “common rule of life”. What’s intimidating is that from the pulpit as well as from social media, we are bombarded with “rules” that too often are contradictory, and folks are left wondering which of these rules are of higher priority. As you demonstrated with your reference to small groups, articulating what some of the “common rules” are is extremely important for helping us keep the focus on intentionally heading in a direction that has purpose and is based on the teachings of Jesus. From my experience, assuming folks know where we are going or what we intend to accomplish is not nearly as successful as articulating in clear terms what we will strive to do together. Lots of food for thought when you hang out with monks!