¶ Introduction to Monastic Rhythm and Time
Hello and welcome. My name is Yunka Dawson and I'm the host of Practice in the Way with John Mark Comer.
Yeah.
A podcast featuring teachings and conversations with John Mark and other voices to help us journey into a deeper life with God in the modern world. Today we're continuing our series Water from a Deep Well with John Mark and Dr. Gerald Sitzer, which explores the history of Christian spirituality and how we can learn from and practice the wisdom of early followers of Jesus.
unique errors. In this episode, John Mark and Dr. Sitzer continue exploring the desert movement as it became more organized in monastic communities and specifically how most valuable commodities. Time. Here is John Mark.
Welcome back to session four of Water from a Deep Well on Rhythm, the spirituality of monasticism. We left off last week with the spirituality of the desert fathers and mothers, which is near and dear to both of our hearts. But this strange eclectic group or movement did not stay a smattering of disorganized kind of mini villages out in the desert for long, right? It eventually spread throughout the world to the west and the east and evolved into what we now think of as monastic orders. Now
You and I also share a strange affinity for the monastic, for monasteries. I know. Gonna hear some of your stories of that later. I love to visit monasteries. I go there regularly on retreat. and as well as to learn. And whether I'm up in Big Sur at a very remote monastery I frequent or at Mount Angel Abbey out in Oregon wine country. Every time I'm there I'm struck by how different their relationship is to time.
It's uh far more ordered, you know, and even monotonous, borderline kind of boring. It's far less hurried, right? It's patient, it's structured, it's unhurried. It's far more prayerful. Like the role of prayer is a very central. I'm used to like morning prayer, even long morning prayer. but then to pause multiple times throughout the day, and yet it's still devoted to work. It's productive. They're not sitting around and just practicing Lectio Divina all day.
And man, I just I'm so struck every time I'm there by how different their approach to life is as a community. So different from our hurry and overactivity and the overwhelm and burnout of modern life. So in this next conversation, you introduce us to what you call rhythm, the spirituality of monasticism, and that's your way of saying the primary kind of spiritual treasure that the monasteries, the monastic movement, which continue to exist.
pass on to us today is the spirituality of rhythm. Tell us more. How do monasteries and monks in general approach Time differently, community differently, life differently. What what is a monastery? Where did it come from? Give us some more color.
¶ Monastic vs. Modern Approach to Time
Well, first when it comes to time, uh you have to start by thinking about how we view time today. And there are two kind of extremes that we easily fall into. I'd say most people do. One is wasting time, which we look at as almost a sin. Uh we are uh very uneasy with boredom. That's kind of an enemy. Uh even social scientists say that boredom is absolutely necessary for human d human development. Out of boredom comes play.
Creativity.
Creativity, thoughtfulness.
Original.
Yeah.
Yeah.
You have to have boredom. Uh, that creates space for something to happen. And if our time, our life is too crowded, there is no space. I find this in my life. When I go through periods when I have more space. my mind, my spirit becomes more fertile. Um so there's the one extreme where we waste time, and the other one is that we use it as if it were a kind of commodity because we want to be as quote productive as we can possibly be.
Time is money, right?
Time is money. The monks, for the most part, learned how to inhabit time. In other words, to be present in it, to be fully given to what they were doing only at that time. And the reason why they could do that is because they knew they had enough time for the other things they would eventually have to do. Now I actually have done an experiment on this, John Mark. So when I started teaching up at Tall Timber And that's
Where this book started as a class.
At first I assigned pages to read.
Okay.
And of course students would take naps and they'd fall apart. But I always get this question, um, do we have to read'em all? And uh they'd end up staying up at night at ten, eleven o'clock to get their work done. They were using time. And finally I had an insight. Why don't you stop assigning Pages and assign time so that we all do it at the same time for say two and a half hours.
And then I said to students, here's what I'd like you to read, but I don't care how much of it you do, but I want you to do this one thing.
Nothing else.
Nothing else.
Just this.
So at first. Others would come up to me, but how many pages do we need to get done here? See those two extremes. But eventually everybody relaxed into it, and I I would say to them Don't get it all done. Just read. If you gain an insight, stop. Think about it. Write in your journal. Ponder it.
But don't do anything else.
They're not going to be able to do
For the two and a half hours, you just inhabit time and run.
They loved it. They loved it. It became freedom to them because they were given time. They weren't given page numbers. And we did that eventually through all of Talltimber. We'd have silence. We'd have morning prayers, noon prayers. uh late afternoon prayers and then la late at night prayers. We had a time every day when I read aloud to them or on the campfire. We had chores. But everything was in an allotted time.
Yeah.
So they became entirely present to that one thing. That's what I mean by inhabit time. But you can't inhabit time if you live according to a to-do list where you're always frantically trying to get things done. And that's that's me. I'm a pretty productive guy. I mean, I come from a Dutch background. If we we excel at being productive, but
I've realized that inhabiting time is really the better way to live and the freer way to live. And that is one of the secrets of monasticism. When a UK scholar took a sabbatical and went to live in a monastery for a few months. For about the first six weeks, he couldn't figure out something that eluded him. He he he realized there's something going on I can't I can't grasp.
And he had an aha moment. Wait a minute. It's a different way of relating to time. And that's one of the legacies that it's given to us.
¶ Personal Journey to Monastic Healing
And monasteries have played a key role in your own life, right? Tell us a little bit about your interpretation.
Yeah, I mean it's been gigantic. Um again, I uh dedicated uh water from a deep well uh to Sister Florence, who comes out of this experience. So, you know, I had this terrible tragedy happen. Uh n back in nineteen ninety one, a long time ago,
And you're you're how old at the time?
I was forty one.
Okay.
And I got a I got a letter about six weeks later, fairly uh close to the accident. And she said, Dear Doctor Sitzer, you've never met me, uh but I'm a Catholic nun and I'm I lead a small m monastery. Actually it was called a house of prayer, kind of a a minor order within the Catholic community. And it's actually just outside the t uh city of Spokane in the mountains. I did not know a thing about it, and she said, God told me that this is going to be a place of healing for you.
And you've just lost your wife, your daughter.
And my mother. And so I took me a few months till I got my feet on the ground and then I I think I called her, maybe not, I can't remember, but I said, Sister Florence, I I want to take you up on this Well they had a central house, they followed a rule of life, rhythm, but they had these hermitages. And she said, I'm gonna put you up in a hermitage, just come from eight till four thirty. Get a little babysitter when you need it. And be alone.
🔇 Silence
First few times up there, I would just get in that hermitage and I would just weep. Only had my Bible and a journal, but then I began to quiet down a little bit. And uh sometimes have lunch with them. By the way, we always ate in silence. Most of the time I'd fast.
But then Sister Florence and I began to meet once in a while. Now some of her theology was a little crazy, I have to admit. God rest her soul, she's dead now. But um sometimes we'd sit together for an hour And not say a word, John Mark. She was just present. And I went there with some regularity for a long time. And when I remarried, guess who was at the wedding? Sister Florence. Beautiful. And that taught me so much because I became present to my pain.
And it gave you the space that our phones and our jobs and our
Well raising three kids.
Parenting. Shopping and all of that just robs us of boredom, of of margin, of space for God to do that deep work. Now she, you know
¶ Origins and Early Spread of Monasticism
moving up into the mountains outside of Spokane is what a millennia and a half into a Christian tradition. Tell us about the monastic movement. How how did the Desert Fathers and Mothers kind of evolve into that? When timestamp this for us, what was the larger cultural setting?
Okay, so it emerged uh pretty much the same time as the dissert fathers and mothers did. It was kind of corrective to the Constantinian church, so to speak. Again, I don't wanna cast a pr aspursion on Constantine. He was just a smart politician. But the church had to figure out how to make adjustments to this uh this new era of church history.
And in the desert, um, there was a lot of experimentation go going on to c uh complete uh anchorite existence, that is hermit living alone for long periods of time. to small groups to little villages where there'd be some kind of rough community but not very robust.
It was experimental.
It was very experimental. And one of the early geniuses of the movement, Pecomius, who came from a pagan background, he was in the Roman army, and during an assignment in Egypt he met some uh Christians. who uh were just different and he was deeply moved by them and he decided he wanted to become a Christian after he got out of the army. Mm-hmm.
Yeah.
And uh he uh joined a community and was mentored and so on, like we talked about before. And then one day he had a vision and in this vision God said, I I want you to serve humankind. And he read that as building a community of people living in some kind of rule of life. Which he did. It took a while to figure it out, and he eventually created a kind of rule that would be familiar to us today. And by the time he died, he had started
I think 14 communities with a total of like seven or six nine thousand monks. Wow. It's crazy. And they lived in little dormitories, two to a room. Uh they had morning prayers, evening prayers, they did physical labor, so the outlines of monastic life were already there. there. That's right. And uh he became a kind of uh e example of what it means to be a follower of Jesus. All that was there. Well that began to spread.
went up to Asia Asia Minor. Uh Basil of Caesarea wrote two rules, a a short one and a long one, that was used there and is still used to this day. And theirs became, at least to some degree, service oriented. So out of one of those monastic experiences in Asia Minor grew the Basilead, the first Christian hospital. That was a monastic experiment. it spread west and Augustine wrote a kind of rule for a group of nuns that spread.
called Augustine's Rule and it's been used in lots of different ways, but one of them are the canons regular, which is a kind of monastic order that's attached to a cathedral. So it does church work, so to speak. but under monastic conditions. John Cassian wrote a rule for this would be the fifth century in Gaul. You get the idea. It's special.
But it's starting to spread. And it's the same kind of basic structure, right? They have a rule of life.
A rhythm of what we're doing.
Kind of an abbot or Live together, work, prayer. Yeah, those basic components are all
And a center of production. I'll come back to that. So um there were all kinds of little rules and experiments all over the place, not a uh a lot of uh order or uh regulation. And then a genius emerges.
¶ Benedict and Monasticism's Impact on the Dark Ages
uh that we are indebted to forever, not just in terms of spiritual, but even culturally. So uh this is the setup, and I love this story. There was a catastrophic occurrence in the sixth century that really had an impact. So much so this is how I discovered it. I was reading an opinion piece in the New York Times and the opinion writer was saying, Is this the worst year in world history? He wrote it in twenty twenty one, referring to COVID.
And I thought, oh, for sure, that's not the case. Have you ever heard of the Black Death? So on a whim I decided to Google worst year in world history and I discovered, lo and behold, a kind of humorous but serious consensus among historians that there is a a worse year. And I'd never heard of it before.
It's not twenty twenty one. No.
Oh, 536. So I did some digging. So there was a kind of prequel to this. And that was all these tribal invasions by uh tribal groups. Yeah. Invasions and migrations into the Roman world cr creating a great deal of disruption.
Be the Visigoths or who?
Angles Saxons, you go on. Yes. Okay. So that weakened the Roman Empire a lot. And then in five thirty six there was a series of volcanic eruptions in Iceland. Of course they didn't know Iceland existed. So it came from I guess nowhere, but somewhere, and it was horrible. was so massive it created a cloud of dust that encircled the globe for eighteen months.
It was
Almost like nighttime. It snowed in Italy in the middle of summer. It set off massive starvation. And cultures that keep records around the world all mention five thirty six.
Around the world.
A world and they've discovered a little layer in the ice cap of Greenland that they can date to five thirty six, it's all gray. Well then a comet struck Australia in the same year, a big comet. So it was Horrible. And then in five forty, Justinian's plague, maybe small cock.
uh, took maybe ten million more people in the Middle East and Europe. You would not have wanted to live. Well, my church history brain lit up and I thought, okay, who's living in the year five thirty six to five forty? Uh huh. Benedict of Nurcia. So here's a man who grows up in an aristocratic background and goes to to Rome for his schooling, becomes very disillusioned by the decline.
and uh just uh decadence of Rome withdraws to a cave. He's borrowing from the playbook of the Desert Fathers and Mothers.
but he's up in Italy but he's
Up in Italy, that's right. And he begins to attract a following. Uh, he calls them to a pretty radical life. They try to poison him because they resent him. They fail, he flees to south of Rome and at a place called Cassi Comino. Uh he founds a little experimental monastery, and this time he writes a little book for them. to give them a clear understanding of what their life is to look like. And it's called the Rule of Saint Benedict. by the time he dies in five forty seven,
He's left behind, I'm pretty sure it's twelve monasteries with maybe a dozen people in each one. Yeah. Hardly noticeable.
Tiny.
Back then nobody would have noticed that it existed at all. It was so small. But that created a foundation that grew and multiplied over time. And literally, John Mark, literally. put Western civilization on its shoulders for five hundred years. Out of that monastic movement that spread and grew and became more consolidated and regulated.
came medical care, hospitality, Animal husbandry, experimentation with all kinds of vegetation, wine production, beer production, medical clinics, libraries, copying of manuscripts, education emissions. I mean, it was a full service institution once it grew and became more established. Uh I mean we don't have anything in our culture that can compare to the cultural dominance of the monastic movement. And no bloodshed, no coercion.
Yeah, wasn't coercive.
No, it just kind of created a culture that eventually permeated the West.
But this was because the wider kind of sociopolitical world
Was in meltdown. Yeah, I mean Rome has declined uh from a million down to thirty thousand within two hundred
In Western history, and now we're kinda keen in on a western part of Western Europe. Eastern's different outside the empire in the Middle East is different.
This is
What we would call the quote dark ages, right?
Yeah, and they were dark. I mean there was still all kinds of creativity, but most of it came out of monasteries.
¶ Monasteries: Cultural and Missionary Powerhouses
Uh uh people were born and raised and and never traveled more than twenty-five miles from home.
Yeah, Rome was shattered, right?
Right. Rome was shattered. So this little experiment became not only a source of renewal to the church, it became a center of cultural production. that we're indebted to to this day. Uh I'll mention architecture in another session or two when it comes to Gothic, but it it it's amazing to look at this heritage and how indebted we are. The books we read.
Some of the medical care missions, every one of those tribes that poured into the Roman Empire was evangelized by monks without exception. For three or four hundred years, every scholar that Western civilization produced was a monk.
So people don't think of monasteries as mission bases or whatever, but tell us some of those stories. Like I'm thinking of Boniface and the punk rock story of cutting down Thor's tree. You wanna tell that or How they went they would plant monasteries in pagan territory, like
Okay, so in in the case of Boniface, he was from uh Bobbio. It was a a monastery in northern Italy, and it became a kind of mega monastery that planted other monasteries. And uh his was one example. He was eventually martyred in in uh uh Friesland or Phrygia up uh around the Netherlands area. Columbanus began a monastery in Iona.
Uh that led to the evangelization of much of what we now call the UK. Colin Bonus came from Blindesvahr. He went to the continent. I mean, it just begins to multiply. And here was always the strategy. They'd moved to a new area culturally. They'd learned the language. They'd build a monastery, they'd develop relationships, trade and otherwise with local communities.
Contribute to the community.
Exactly. They'd serve it, they'd start an educational institution and gradually Christianize. Now they didn't catechize very well, but nobody was back then. But they would certainly Christianize. And they would begin to create a kind of culture there um that would have m materi I mean, churches, they'd start
uh evangelizing, then they would start appointing local bishops and that sort of thing. And gradually Europe was won over to the gospel. And that was really the creation of Christendom, not Constantine. It was monasteries and the way they evangelized and settled Europe. And the way they created cultural production for Europe that eventually led to institutional division of labor, universities, hospitals and stuff.
And and outside of the Roman Empire, I mean, what Europe, we now think of this like kind of post-Christian, highly civilized. It was tribal, it was pagan. I'm thinking of the Norse gods, right? It was violent. And they went right into the dark heart of all.
They went into the heart of it all. When we talk about the superior of Western civilization, I want to tell people, check your DNA from way back. Yes. You were part of some marauding group that was killing and raping people all the time.
Yeah, the Middle East, right, which was still highly Christian for the first thousand years, right? And the churches thriving outside the Roman Empire, to the east, in the Middle East and Africa. It was way ahead culturally of Europe.
Yeah, until until for a number of reasons. We don't need to go into that. population declined just dramatically. But scholars estimate that in the year, say, six hundred before Islam uh emerged, there were more Christians w east of Syria than west of Syria.
Yeah, I remember reading Philip Jenkins on that and he has the the picture of like the standards a famous missionary map from I think nineteen oh five and Jerusalem is all the way over on the right hand side of the map. And it shows the spread of the gospel from Jerusalem through Asia Minor and the Roman Empire into Europe and then across in you know in
Ireland and the
And then across the Atlantic to America and then there I'm I'm at California on the other side. And he basically says in the first thousand years, or certainly the first six to eight hundred years, you could draw the same map and put Jerusalem all the way on the left. Yeah, that's right.
It goes far east, far west.
You're planting monasteries in China and in what we would now call Germany and Norway and Ireland, right? Mm-hmm.
All of it. Wow. All of it. Primary means of kind of growth and evangelization. Again, I'm not saying it was all good, but we don't even do all good. I mean let's not get too judgmental here.
¶ Prayer, Work, and Virtues of Monastic Life
A rich legacy there. Now, the twin pillars, at least in Benedict's model of monastic life, are prayer and work. Tell us more about that.
Well, I divide our understanding of monasticism along that way. So let's start with work. Um the the phrase they used was aura et labora, all of life should be about prayer and work. And they w they weaved those two together into a larger whole. So one would give way to the other. You'd pray, prayer would drive you to work. You'd work, work would drive you back into prayer. Back and forth and back and forth.
So on the work side of things, the m major work of the leader of the monastery, the abbot, was to care for the souls of the monks. And he had to treat each one of them, or she in the case of Amas or Abbases. had to treat each one as an individual. Uh ironic, way back then, each one has their own weaknesses, each one's strengths. You need to adapt your pastoral care to that particular person.
This is where spiritual direction comes from.
Exactly. So the abbot had a job description, and this is mentioned in the rule of Saint Benedict four or five times. The souls of the monks are accountable directly to you, and you'll be judged accordingly. Pretty scary. Yeah. Yeah.
They were functionally businesses as well, right?
The one who ran the hospitality a wing of the monks. So there were job descriptions. Uh, but there was also labor for everybody in the monastery. Every monk had to do kitchen duty every week. I love that. Yeah. I mean getting your hands dirty no matter high up you are you peel potatoes.
From the abbot to the novice.
Exactly.
Thursday night you're on KP duty.
But then there were specialties. Monks that would take care of the orchard or would take care of the sheep or would build furniture.
Or teach the novices, right?
Or experiment with things. So it became a highly experimental, productive community. Yeah. But again The production was subject to a healthy rhythm. There was also the work of virtue. They identified some virtues that were especially important for monasteries. Three of them. Only one you could guess. There was obedience, somewhat obvious. There was silence.
uh as a virtue and there was humility but there was a fourth they added stability. When you finally joined a monastery after a period of novishit, a training period, a testing period. You join for life. The only way you'd leave the monastery is if you were sent by the monastery. It could be to be an abbot, to do missions, to be a scholar, or to become a bishop or something like that. In other words, You remained stationary.
If you were sent out, that was your home until death.
They call that stability. No more moving from one monastery to another depending on how good the chef is or how cool the abbot is.
No more searching for a better life.
No
You find the life of God right where you are.
So that was the that was the work part of their life. Oh, by the way, they would study, but I'll come back to that. The prayer side is they divided up the day into eight periods of prayer, very short. A bell would ring. And they would file into the chapel in silence. And they would spend a few moments being quiet, chanting psalms.
Praying.
No big sermon, nothing like that. Uh in the third time called terse, they would have the Eucharist every day if they had someone, a priest who was ordained who could uh administer it, okay? Eight times a day. The first one two two A. M. So on and so forth. Now again, very short. Wow. Yeah. So what they would do is they would create this kind of rhythm of life. Yeah. No matter what you were doing, middle of a sentence, if you were copying something.
Uh if you're picking apples off a tree and you've got three more to pluck, that bell rings, you go. You stop. No more looking at watches or thinking, I've just got a little bit more to do. You'd stop and you'd go and you'd quiet down. You'd pray. And then go back to work again. Now where they brought those two worlds together, I would say would be in study. Where you studied, that was work, but you studied
Perfully.
You'd study for transformation, not just for information. Yeah. And the best book on this is by a monastic collar, Jean Leclerc, called The Love of Learning and the Desire for God. And it's about the monastic way of learning. I read that in grad school and it transformed my entire life. I began to think differently about how I learned. I'd rather learn less and learn it better than just consume information for information's sake.
¶ Monastic Renewal and Lasting Impact
So that was the structure. And then that began to multiply. And as it multiplied, it took on more and more order. Now, monasteries like any other institution could be corrupted. Yep.
Institutionalized, yep.
And so there would develop renewal movements within the Benedictine.
Because some of these monasteries worked so well they became rich, right? And with wealth and power comes everything that comes with wealth and power.
So Benedict says you can't own anything, but he doesn't say anything about the monastery owning.
Yeah.
Like lots of art.
Yeah, so...
Pluniacs were a movement that started in nine oh nine, the Cistercians in ten ninety eight, and there are others like that too, that would rediscover something that was essential to the monastic movement and kind of
I like to say there were lots of quote reformations before the reformation.
Oh absolutely.
But they were mostly starting new monastic orders or the renewal of existing monastic orders.
Well, uh there are lots of things I think about that are are useful here. One is the need for patience in the Christian life. Yeah. These monasteries were slow moving, but they moved a long way. Uh they were quiet and methodical, but highly productive, but always with a kind of unhurried pace. And you think about their legacy as I've already mentioned to you in terms of pure cultural production.
Yes.
Uh but never with an iron fist. I mean they served villages. In fact, if you go to Europe today, you'll often find a monastery or the ruins of a monastery in the middle of a city.
Yeah.
Because the city grew up around the monastery and then they'd educate the the
Originally it was Boniface or whatever, just going out in the middle of nowhere and building a community from scratch, and now it's Prague or it's whatever city in Europe we think of. Yeah.
¶ Adapting Monastic Wisdom for Modern Life
So I have been profoundly affected by this movement and how uh how we can do the the careful, reflective, prayerful work of um adapting it to our
Yeah, I was gonna say, what can we learn from this spirituality? In in in many ways it's so different from our own. And in particular, just those of us that are married or have a family. or work for a, you know, a typical kind of nine to six career or job. I mean, these are celibate monks and nuns who live in community. Um w what can what can we learn from the spirituality of rhythm?
Well, obviously our circumstances are very different, so we have to figure out how to adapt it. I think the easiest way is to try as you've done, so I'm I'm tipping my hat to you. is to try to develop some kind of rule of life that is reasonable and relevant to our own time and place. Mhm. I'll give you uh an example of that from my own life. After uh the accident I knew I was in over my head. Three kids. I didn't know what I was doing.
And fairly early on, I just remember sitting down and thinking, what can I do here to create some kind of rough order to our life? What do we want to be about? Because I gained so much from my wife. She was an extraordinary woman, honestly. She was just so smart and godly, and she was gone. So I wrote down six principles that would inform what I wanted our family to become. Uh one was active faith. Another was hospitality, A third was work and uh service, so on. Six of them.
And I look back now and think, oh my goodness. That set a trajectory for our lives. Never perfectly. I wasn't a perfect father, but it did give us a sense of what we were about, what our purpose was. That would be one example. They're family or a house with a bunch of friends living together, even a
A clarity of purpose.
A clarity of purpose, clear trajectory that would start with principle and then with flexibility.
Yeah, and it can't stay aspirational.
Work it out in some details. Uh, reading aloud was one of the things we did, for example, in our family. I mean, for a long time. And uh that's what my my wife and I uh now have a rule of life that we follow and has to do with what we do in the mornings and the evenings and hospitality and other things. But the other one is rhythm. Somehow we have to know when to stop something and just be still.
So as I say, I always wake up in the morning, I do it early, it's in my Dutch farming background, I wake up to slow down. I slow down more after I'm awake than before I'm awake because I want to begin the day in quiet. uh meditating on a psalm, I have a lot memorized, so I do that. And I just want to be still. I gather myself together before God.
Yeah.
And then I pray God ahead of me through the day. So when I'm envisioning the day ahead of me, I'm always imagining God's already there. He's in that classroom, he's w in that appointment, he's in that conversation, he's in the time when I'm I'm uh planning dahlias in the spring. He's there. So I'm stepping into a space that God already occupies. What can I do to see and cooperate with that presence?
So that's a very different way than going through life and thinking, I gotta make this happen. It's all my responsibility. Mm-hmm. That would be a couple of examples of how I applied it. So I I gotta tell ya a funny little story, funny to me.
I'm doing an interview on Water from a Deep Well to a pretty conservative uh broadcast that interviewed me for five uh shows, half hour each. I won't name it, but I I know these guys pretty well, but they're pretty conservative, and they're asking me about monasticism and I go on and on and they start to laugh to two people interviewing me and they say, Yeah, now all right, now what does this have to do with family life?
I mean, we're not monasteries. And I said, Well a lot And I mentioned some of these things and I said, Yeah, family life and marriage in particular is a lot like monasticism, pause, with benefits.
Oh my god.
They could not stop laughing. I said, Oh, edit that out. Oh no, we're gonna keep it in. And they heard from some of their listeners, but they got it as something humorous. But actually that's the point. I'm married, but I can still learn from this incredibly important tradition in the history of Christianity.
And so can the church. I think you know in my life just even as a pastor, one thing that was really impactful for me and how I think about and imagine church going forward was realizing that monasteries are churches. That might sound so odd, but I had never thought of a monastery as a church. They called themselves a congregation. So when I'm with, you know, Uh Abbot Jeremy at Mount Angel Abbey and Oregon, he talks about his congregation and he's referring to the monastery.
They are a community of people following Jesus. They're just not like a Protestant congregation with men and women and kids where anybody can show up on a Sunday. You have to be male or female, you have to go through an avitiate, take a vow of poverty, sell all your possessions, move in, live by a rule of life, die on site. But it's a congregation, it's a church. Right. It's a community following Jesus in a place just with a very different model of church.
Than what we're used to. And again, I, like you, am uh married. I have three children. I now have responsibilities that would keep me from ever living in that way. But I wanna draw, not just for me personally, but for our community. Like one of the things we talk a lot about with practicing the way is how rule of life
is kind of making a minor comeback in the wider kind of you know spirituality of the church, but it's being run through the grid of radical individualism. Yeah. With like an individual or a married couple writing their own rule of life, as you know. To Saint Benedict that would have been a nonsensical concept.
No made sense.
Rules of life were written for a community. Right. To hold a community together around.
Family, small group, church. It's uh applicable in lots of different settings. How do we
So that's that's my my thought here is just as we think about rhythm, it's not just how do I think about rhythm. Or even how does my family think about rhythm? But how does our community think about rhythm and ordering our life together around prayer and work?
Another one of our rhythms now that I'm a alone with uh Patricia is uh uh almost not always almost a daily walk. We walk down this beautiful boulevard, down to a park and then back again. And uh we're always quiet for a while. And then we cut catch up, but we also just spend time thinking about the world around us, being present to it. And inhabiting inhabiting it. Which is where really the good place to to end is how can we inhabit time?
Not waste time. And not use time to
Or consume time. It's a gift that God has given to us. I mean, I love what um a number of spiritual writers have said about the eternal moment. Yeah. The closest we are to eternity is right now, this this present moment. The past we can't change. Uh, the future we can't control, but we can be present to what is happening right now.
Well I'm inspired as we end this conversation to inhabit Time in the days and weeks ahead as we continue to learn from the spirituality of monks and nuns and our spiritual ancestors.
¶ Conclusion and Acknowledgments
Thanks for listening. This podcast is from Practice in the Way. We develop resources to help churches and small groups apprentice in the way of Jesus. We're a crowdfunded nonprofit, so everything we make is completely free because it's already been paid for by the circle. Community of monthly
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Special thanks today goes to Aaron from Huntsville, Texas, Cheryl from Auburn, California, Jane from Oxford, Oxfordshire, Eleanor from Eugene, Oregon, and Alexander from Atlanta, Georgia. Thank you all very much. To join this friend in the circle or learn more about our resources, visit Practice in the Way Until next time, may the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ be
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