Anyone read this work by an anonymous 14th century monk?
An excerpt from Thomas Merton: A Life in Letters: The Essential Collection, edited by William H. Shannon and Christine M. Bochen. Reprinted by permission of HarperOne, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.
To Susan Chapulis. Susan Chapulis was a sixth-grader, studying monasticism, when she wrote to Merton requesting “any information whatever” that she could share with her class.
April 10, 1967.
Thanks for your nice letter. You want “any information whatsoever” to help the sixth grade in the study of monasticism. Well, I’ll see if I can get the brothers down in the store to send you a little book about the monastery here. That ought to help.
The monastic life goes back a long way. Monks are people who seek to devote all their time to knowing God better and loving Him more. For that reason they leave the cities and go out into lonely places where it is quiet and they can think. As they go on in life they want to find lonelier and lonelier places so they can think even more. In the end people think these monks are really crazy going off by themselves and of course sometimes they are. On the other hand when you are quiet and when you are free from a lot of cares, when you don’t make enough money to pay taxes, and don’t have a wife to fight with, and when your heart is quiet, you suddenly realize that everything is extremely beautiful and that just by being quiet you can almost sense that God is right there not only with you but even in you. Then you realize that it is worth the trouble of going away where you don’t have to talk and mess around and make a darn fool of yourself in the middle of a lot of people who are running around in circles to no purpose. I suppose that is why monks go off and live in lonely places. Like me now I live alone in the woods with squirrels and rabbits and deer and foxes and a huge owl that comes down by my cabin and makes a spooky noise in the night, but we are friends and it is all ok. A monk who lives all by himself in the woods is called a hermit. There is a Rock ‘n Roll outfit called Herman and his Hermits but they are not the same thing.
I do not suppose for a moment that you wish to become a hermit (though now I understand there are some girl hermits in England and they are sort of friends of mine because they are hermits, so I send them stuff about how to be a hermit). But anyway, I suggest that you sometimes be quiet and think about how good a thing it is that you are loved by God who is infinite and who wants you to be supremely happy and who in fact is going to make you supremely happy. Isn’t that something? It is, my dear, and let us keep praying that it will work out like that for everybody. Good bye now.
Chris Armstrong’s synopsis of the recent renewal in monasticism. Two years old but worth checking out..
Check out this article from the Times.
Does Africa still need missionaries?
What do you say after witnessing 40 years of the monastic calling?
“Here we are…”
Take a look at Br Enzo’s letter, as prior of the Bose community.
at Tegel prison
Was Dietrich Bonhoeffer the first New monastic? His ill-fated seminary at Finkenwalde had some of the hallmarks of a NM community – and it was DB who later wrote from prison:
the restoration of the church will surely come only from a new type of monasticism which has nothing in common with the old but a complete lack of compromise in a life lived in accordance with the Sermon on the Mount in the discipleship of Christ. I think it is time to gather people together to do this.
Right. After spending the best part of a year worrying about our budding seminary, I draw aside to create space for more creative things – such as this blog.
It needs more focus, hence a shift from general monastic issues to a fairly specific subject: the ‘new monasticism’. I retain the name ‘african monastic’ because of monasticism’s intrinsic value to our continent – but I’d like now to narrow the scope to the recent phenomenon in contemporary monasticism.
Below are links to 2 videos produced by Travis Best at The Work of the People:
http://www.theworkofthepeople.com/index.php?ct=store.details&pid=V00474
http://www.theworkofthepeople.com/index.php?ct=store.details&pid=V00498
Both videos feature reflections by Claudio Oliver, a pastor who lives in Curitiba, Brazil.
I’m reading Community of the Transfiguration by Paul Dekar. Part of the small but growing body of literature on this ‘great spiritual movement of our day’, this slim 162 pp volume adds to the ‘New Monastic Library’ , a series edited by Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove and published by Wipf & Stock.
Dekar’s book follows his earlier article on Monastic Renewal in Australia (Evangelical Review of Theology, July 2007). It describes the life of Holy Transfiguration Monastery (HTM), a Baptist monastery Down Under. I’ll be reviewing a chapter at a time in the comments that follow…
Several months ago, popular author Philip Yancey addressed a men’s breakfast in Melbourne – the article can be found here. In his talk, he refers to the so-called ‘monastic cycle’, wherein he discerns a pattern in the life of monastic groups – in this case, the Benedictines.
“… every time they achieved that prosperity, it started to undermine everything else. And he went through about 4 cycles over the 1200 years history of the Benedictines where they were doing very well at prospering, and then they started to break apart and they started to divide and dissolve ultimately, and then someone would come along and remind them of their heritage and would crank it up again.”
Yancey goes on to apply this ‘cycle’ to the story of the OT, modern church life and – pointedly – to national culture: ‘Where are we [Americans] on the monastic cycle?’ The article is provocative, and a few questions are in order:
- is it legitimate to speak of a monastic ‘cycle’? Do several historical Benedictine revivals necessarily indicate a regular cycle?
- if so, what was it that broke the monastic cycle? Was it prosperity, or are there other factors?
- finally, can one draw a parallel between this cycle and the cultural ebb-and-flows of nations?
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