Exploring Monastic Wisdom for Day to Day Living

In our journey so far, we have almost rushed from one room to the next in a most un-benedictine manner. But now we have a significant threshold before us: the door into the new year. With half the pilgrimage ahead of us, and on a Sunday, let us take a meditative Sabbath pause.

Dec 29
Dec 29 The Fifth Day of Christmas: Educating the Heart

For one quarter of the day, every Benedictine is supposed to do reading from the monastery library. But here is the crucial insight. The point is not to have the reader go through the book. It is instead for the book to go through the reader. How different would we read the Christmas story, if we do not just go through the story but let the story go through us?

Dec 28
Dec 28 The Fourth Day of Christmas: Nurturing, Feasting and Fasting

These 12 Days of Christmas we are walking through the rooms of a monastery to help us explore and deepen the rooms of our heart. On the first day we walked together through the gate, the entrance to the monastic space, which can be interpreted also as the walk inside ourselves. From there on the second day we invited you into the monastic cell, which also stands for the chamber of our heart. Yesterday we pondered the monastic church as a sacred place of shared spirituality we try to create in our own lives. Today we arrive at another central place of the monastery, just behind the chapel: the kitchen!

Dec 27
Dec 27 The Third Day of Christmas: Creating Sacred Space

Almut Furchert & Chuck Huff

When we pray regularly, we create an architecture in time that allows the transcendent to break through, slowly, imperceptibly – in the way flowing water shapes stone.

Dec 26
Dec 26 The Second Day of Christmas: Living with yourself

It’s seems an open secret that being alone is an important art, but that most of us find it difficult to do. In fact, being alone can be dangerous: One can fall into loneliness and despair. But solitude is different from loneliness, it neither means nor endorses leaving people behind, but calls us to retreat into the presence of the moment in which we are alone with God.

Dec 25
Dec 25 The First Day of Christmas: Opening the Gate

Who is this King of Glory? Oddly, when we open the doors, our royal guest is an infant. And the child comes in the most astonishing and appropriate way, borne by a mother in pain and hope, born in poverty, bound to a life of wandering and homelessness.

Dec 16
Dec 16 Entering the Christmas Season

In this time of expectant waiting, whether your heart is burdened or joyful or some of both, we hope that Christmas soon will find you where you are.

Advent is a pregnant time, a time of expectant waiting. This Advent has been transformed for us because we are indeed…

Mar 31
Mar 31 The Heart of the Desert and the Threshold of Easter

The sorrow of the days before Easter is at the heart of the Desert Elders' teaching. But grief is out of fashion. We prefer to be spiritual.

Mar 28
Mar 28 What to do with Passion Week? Or: Blessed are those who mourn

Spring break is a good time for doing all sorts of things: cleaning up, writing articles, having a vacation. For many it is also just work as usual. But being called to mourning is an existential task. No religion can do it for us. It cannot be mere theater that we watch. But religion can help us to be reminded and can provide for us an occasion. There is no resurrection, no new beginning without the deep mourning of the old, without letting go what we loved so dearly, without mourning our losses.

Mar 24
Mar 24 Cleansing the Self for Service: again, that fiery humility

What to do when we find ourself in the Desert? Welcome our fears with a fiery humility.

Mar 20
Mar 20 Pilgrimage, Interrupted

Our pilgrimage is interrupted by unexpected events. Can obedience to these interruptions be the real journey?

Mar 17
Mar 17 The Obedience of the Desert Elders: a tool for reflecting the true self

When our will bumps up against the will of another, we can discern the desires of the true self.

Mar 11
Mar 11 Amma Syncletica: The fiery nature of humility

I have always thought of humility as simpering and self-effacing – silent because of fear or weakness. While reading the Sayings of the Desert Elders, I was stunned by the image of a fiery humility. Where had that been hiding?

Mar 10

Mar 10 Learning from the Desert Elders: Taking Conversation to Heart

Today I want to introduce you to a central practice of the Desert Elders: conversation. This is not a conversation to meet the other, it is a conversation with another in which we meet, and come to know, ourselves.

Mar 4

Mar 4 The alphabet of the Spirit: A conversation with Evagrius Ponticus

Three hundred years after the death of Jesus on the outskirts of Jerusalem and 1,000 kilometers away, the habitable margins of the deserts of Egypt were filling up with strange people devoted to becoming more like him. The eldest and most revered of these are called the Desert Elders. Most were native Egyptian villagers and peasants who left their villages and farms to enter the desert and follow more seriously the way of Christ. They were mostly poor, not well educated, and of lower social class. Their language was Coptic, with its roots in the ancient agriculture of the Nile.

Feb 26

Feb 26 Walking with the Desert Elders through Lent: An invitation

lesson from the monastery, Lenten Retreat

The deep origins of Christianity are in the desert. It was an urban and pastoral culture on the edge of the desert into which Jesus was born. When he was baptized, Jesus was driven to walk into the desert for 40 days of fasting and reflection. The origins of monasticism came from Christians walking into the desert, away from the distractions and comfort of urban society. This Lent, we will be reflecting on the spiritual journeys and wisdom of those desert Elders. What knowledge can these gentle and severe extremists bring us for our own life journeys?

Feb 6

Feb 6 Courage for Solitude: With Some Help from Rainer Maria Rilke

poetry

Currently on our own writing retreat tucked away on a little island in mainland Florida surrounded only by water and wildlife we came to ponder on the art of solitude in new ways. It is not always easy to be with each other in solitude. Suddenly you are met by problems which long wanted to be discussed, by duties which long needed to be done, by questions which have long waited for answers, even by a blog post which is not written yet.

Jan 22
Jan 22 In Praise of Ordinary Times: What the monastery teaches us about finding the sacred in the ordinary

lesson from the monastery

Jan 15
Jan 15 Ignoring the Rev. Dr. King