thoughts from my time at the monastery
Written by Mark Van Steenwyk : July 8, 2006
I’m not sure I can say I enjoyed my time at St. John’s Abbey. It was a good experience; but it was also a cross-cultural experience, and as such my experience was fraught with internal tensions. As I prayed the morning and evening prayers with the brothers there (and one day with the sisters at St. Benedict’s), I could almost hear charismatic voices in my heads murmurring in dismay. My ecclesial roots are charismatic/evangelical. In a tradition that values spontaneity, there is little room for the overwhelming structure of Benedictine monasticism. In the end, I was never really quite able to enjoy my prayer times or find them nourishing. Though I would bet that after a month or so, I would begin to find it valuable.
Another observation: the sisters are much more fun to be around than the brothers. The architecture of the two monasteries embodies the difference between the Brothers of St. John and the Sisters of St. Benedict: the men’s oratory and chapel were dark, cold, and majestic. The sisters’ oratory and chapel were warm, light, and inviting. I think I’d make a better nun than a monk.
Here are some of the things I’ve learned during my week with the monastics:
- There are a lot more people experimenting with new forms of structured communal Christianity than I had thought. People from all sorts of traditions realize that Christianity is best done together. And that in order for it to work, we need to live out rhythms of prayer and agree to some pretty serious community rules.
- Mennonites and Catholics have more in common than I previously thought. There was a lot of love being shared between the mennonites and catholics that I met during the week.
- Civil disobedience is a spiritual discipline that is desperately needed and something I definitely want to embrace.
- Submission is the heart of worship. If we want to reject the authoritarianism of the clergy/laity distinction, we need to replace it with a robust sort of communal mutual submission.
- Vows of stability are more necessary in our highly transitional world.
for further reading . . .
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Amen.
Mark -
Great to hear you were challenged -
JVD
Please expand on, “Civil disobedience is a spiritual discipline…”
Well, there are lots of examples for this. A classic example is civil rights activism during the 1960s in the south. Contemporary examples would be to block developers from demolishing low income homes that were lost to “eminent domain” or for missionaries to go to boycotted countries (like Cuba). For folks in the peace tradition it could mean going into areas of war to try to stop violence or go to protest unlawfully at prisons to stop executions or abortion clinics to hinder abortions. Civil disobedience could also involve not paying immoral taxes. For the most part, I feel it is good to stand in the way of violence, injustice, or oppression wherever it can be found, using peaceful resistance.
Oooo! I especially resonate with 4 and 5. I was at a seminar once where a European was critiquing Western culture’s complete miss on even the basics of mutual submission. He did point out though how the majority of large immigrant families are rich in the understanding of mutual submission. In that case, West Bank is a goldmine–ready to re-teach us how to live this out.
5. is a no brainer–a critical mass has to be stable and steady, otherwise all you’ve got is highly transisting, undirected, unreflected, chaos.
your concept of civil disobedience is interesting