Writing in the Foreword to the collection of essays “A Monastic Vision for the 21^st Century”, Br. Patrick Hart, monk of the Abbey of Gethsemani in Kentucky , makes this comment.  

“When I was younger in the monastic way I had dreams of a kind of monasticism in the Christian West that would be open to young men and women who, after completing their college work and before deciding on a life situation, would retire to a monastery for several years as part of their growth process, much like Hindu and Zen Buddhist monks of the Far East have done for centuries.” (1)  

This idea has attracted me over many years and I would like to try and develop Br Patrick’s thought a little further. I do so, not as one who has experienced monastic life or the formation offered by a seminary, but as a married man with children (and now grandchildren), whose professional life has been spent teaching in schools. That I have had the privilege in recent years of being able to share the Liturgical Office with the Benedictine Community of nuns near my home in England has, in some small way, offered me an insight into lives very different from my own.

 Vocation to the diocesan priesthood and the religious life of monastic communities is a matter of serious concern in the West.  

Diocesan Seminaries, once full with many men preparing for ordination, are now often empty spaces where a few men rattle round in their priestly formation.  Likewise, monastic communities for both men and women, are shrinking in size as the age profile of their communities rises. On a very practical level, the care of these aging communities is becoming a matter of self-help, for the younger members of the communities are no longer there to assist with the day-to-day chores of necessary care. And will young men and women enter these communities knowing that a critical aspect of their vocation will be one of care in an old people’s home?  

Yet, there is an interest and enquiry about the monastic life that is keen and alive. The television programme screened by the BBC in 2005 following the experience of five men at Worth Abbey(2) (and its subsequent sequel for a group of women in 2006 with the Poor Clares at Arundel (3) ) is evidence of the fascination and attraction that the idea of a community enclosure, founded in faith, still holds for many, men and women of faith, and those of none.  

So they come and ask that they might experience the first stages of preparation for the monastic life and they stay for a period of time until either they are asked to leave by the community, who in their wisdom and insight deem them unsuited to the life, or leave of their own volition, returning to continue their seeking their personal life experience in our secular society.  

Whatever the reason for their leaving and however long the monastic experience might have been, they will have been touched and changed by the daily pattern of prayer in community and that will remain with them in some form during subsequent years.  

But then, our societal pattern is short term in so many ways.  

No longer is it the norm that there is a job for life from an early age.

We seek different opportunities and retrain with new skills as the economic climate demands, often interspersed with periods of unemployment.  

No longer do families remain domiciled in the immediate village or small town of their birth but move away to other parts of the country or to other places in our shrinking world.  

No longer do many experience a life-long commitment to a partner in marriage. The pressures on maintaining marital fidelity are enormous and many fall under the strain. So it could be argued that communities built from a shorter term commitment might offer younger people from fractured family backgrounds their first real sense of community living, with its inter-dependence and shared responsibility, a thread so often missing from their family experience. Our life in faith is nurtured in the patterns of our day to day living, one is not divisible from the other.

 Our values, and the context in which we try to live them out, have changed radically in the last sixty years and so it should be no surprise that given this upheaval across the countries of the West that our Church Community should likewise find itself under stress.

It is a society with high material expectations and this must add to the pressures on men and women making life decisions.  

We can meet this challenge in a number of ways, each with certain consequences. Retreating into a comfort zone “of what it use to be like”, we can bemoan change and seek only to re-create what we knew once existed, the patterns and structures that we (and our parents) felt secure within. It worked then, so why not now? We are surprised and saddened when that backward looking solution fails, as inevitably it will. That is not a defeatist view, but it does ask the question that Sydney Carter posed in one of his songs, The Present Tense:  

“… so shut your bible up and show me how, the Christ you talk about is living now” (4)  

Those who see a return to a Church that is pre-Vatican II as a way forward are in fact walking into a cul-de-sac that offers only nostalgia.

 We should however seriously reflect on what has been in the past and ask, in consequence, what might be in the future. How can we build on the experience of Christian formation over many centuries from the time of the Desert Fathers, through the Middle Ages and the growth of the great monastic orders of the day to where we are now, in a different world where change is often both rapid and radical? The monastic vision of contemplative prayer has to be connected in some way to the current experience of Christian Faith.  

The Taize Community that emerged in France under the leadership of Br Roger in the late ‘40s is evidence that there will be a response when a realistic connection is made with contemporary needs. The commitment of the Brothers at Taize is life-long but their pattern of living has broken new ground and young men and women the world over have recognised the integrity of their message and responded to it.  

Such reflection will demand a personal honesty as we seek to find new patterns in our lives, not totally disconnected from the mainspring of past experience, but developing from it in the light of changed times.

 Our third option, of complaining that all is lost and there is no renewal possible, is no option at all for a Christian who journeys in hope and trust in the Lord.  

So how might we move ahead and seek to build a monasticism that answers the call of our particular time in history? Michael Casey, early in his essay “Thoughts on Monasticism’s possible futures” comments that “In the past, the evolution of the monastic way of life has not followed an inherent logic but has constantly adapted its form to any situation in which it emerges” (5)

 First, we must offer real opportunity for Christian people to experience life in a community of faith in the School of the Lord’s Service (6) that Benedict spoke of so many centuries ago. The tradition of hospitality that is integral to communities of men and women who have made a monastic commitment, is alive and well and there are those who seek time apart in order to share that experience, albeit brief and transitory. Some who have taken this opportunity return again and again, seeking the renewal and refreshment that comes with waiting at the well. They pause and then they go back, to their work, to their homes and to the family life that is their chosen pattern. Memory of my own visits to the Benedictines at Quarr Abbey, in the Isle of Wight , in the late 50s and early 60s has remained with me over subsequent years.

 Yet others will feel drawn to a continuing association, seeking a faith life that contrasts in so many ways with the secular ways in which they presently live and they might want to stay a little longer.

 It is a small leap of faith towards the ideas outlined by Patrick Hart in his Foreword that might in fact rejuvenate the monastic vocation in our own time. Maybe the chance to spend a dedicated period of time in prayer, reflecting on the truths of our Christian Faith might not only help individuals in their own formation, but allow them to bring back to their immediate surroundings, both in the workplace and in personal friendships, the values of such communities.  

There will be those who find through this gradual experience, that the call of God extends beyond a limited time and asks a life-long stability within a community. So be it. What is noticeable is that those who do seek admission, either to a diocesan seminary or a monastic community, are no longer youngsters with little life familiarity. They are more mature men and women who have experience of the rough and tumble of life. Not only do they have a clearer idea of what it is they seek, they also know what they will be relinquishing in order that they might pursue this dedicated path. That can only be good for them as individuals and benefit the larger community whom they serve.

 After all this argument we must not forget to ask the fundamental question- why seek a monastic vocation at all? In looking at structures we can easily forget what it is we are seeking, and how it is that we are being sought by God. James Finley quotes Thomas Merton in his book “Merton’s Palace of Nowhere”.  

“The trouble with monastic life is that too many enter it with the hope of becoming a mystic. What they do not realize is that in becoming a mystic, you are not more than you were before, you’re less. In fact there is nobody left but God”(7)

 Where new tracks are taken after older walkways appear to have come to an end, the reason for the monastic choice, whether it is life-long or short-term, is to seek and experience the love of God. Only then can the patterns of life be determined.  

Notes:  

(1)     Foreword “Monastic Vision in the 21^st C”  edited Br Patrick Hart   OCSO                  Cistercian Publications 2006  

(2)     June/July 2005 Benedictine Community of Worth Abbey
    The Monastery    BBC Television

(3)     June/July 2006 Convent of Poor Clares, Arundel
    The Convent       BBC Television

 (4)     Sydney Carter:  “The Present Tense”. 
   Collected on the CD “The Lord of the Dance”   1998 Stainer & Bell

 “Your holy hearsay is not evidence.
Give me the good news in the present tense.

What happened nineteen hundred years ago
May not have happened.
How am I to know?

So shut your Bibles up and show me how
The Christ you talk about
Is living now.      

      The living truth is what I long to see

      I cannot live upon what use to be     

      So shut the bible up

      And show me how

      The Christ you talk about is living, is living now”  

(5)     Michael Casey OCSO,  monk of Tarrawarra Abbey , Australia :
    Essay in the Monastic Vision in the 21^st C already quoted.  

(6)     “St Bernard of Clairvaux expanded and implemented the thought of St Benedict when he called the monastery a School of Charity . The main object of monastic discipline according to St Bernard, was to restore to man’s nature created in the image and likeness of God-that is to say, created for love and self surrender”

             - Thomas Merton in MONASTIC PEACE  

(7)     “Merton’s Palace of Nowhere”: Pg 79 James Finley Ave Maria Press        Notre Dame, Indiana. First published 1978:  Revised edition 2003