Unintentional Monks

I’m continuing my COVID supplement to The Book of Waking Up. If you’d like to support this project, signup for my Substack. 

15. Unintentional Monks

We’re weeks deep into this pandemic, which means we are weeks deep into a waking opportunity. Sent to our own cloisters (homes can be monasteries too, see), we’ve been presented with a sort of multiple-choice quiz. 

Given a forced lock-in, it’s best to:

  1. distract yourself with bad habits, coping mechanisms, and addictions;

  2. adopt rhythms that allow you to connect with the Divine Love of God; or,

  3. buy a cabin on 40 wooded, stockpile it with rice and beans, and wait for the second coming of some great Salvation.

You might not have considered the question in such explicit terms, but you feel the gravity of the choice. Don’t you? Haven’t you been confronted by your own pull to vice? Haven’t you seen the ways solitude exposes how asleep you can be? 

This forced cloistering has led more than a few writers these days to examine the power of the monastic life. It’s led many of us to ask a simple question: What can we learn from the modern monks? 

In his article, “We’re all Monks Now,” Gregory Hillis shares the wisdom of the Cistercian monks at Kentucky’s Abbey of Gethsemani. He writes: 

Michael Casagram, O.C.S.O., at Gethsemani said that perhaps Covid-19 is “a divinely disguised moment for human breakthrough.” Our society revolves around the notion that power and wealth give meaning to existence, that they allow us to take control of our lives. But, Father Casagram continued, “power and wealth create an illusion of meaning and purpose while undermining our spiritual destiny.” We think they give us some measure of control, but in reality they “close the door to grace.”

...

Yet our pursuit of meaning through power and wealth leaves us spiritually impoverished as we scurry about, consumed by the busyness of life.

Hillis pours a straight shot, offers no chaser. In the span of a few weeks, with the collective strokes of a few dozen gubernatorial pens, our illusions of power, wealth (actual or relative), and security evaporated. What was left? For many, there was nothing but our own naked, impoverished spirits.

The New Demon has put us on our heels, sent us retreating. It has made unintentional monks of us all. And here we are, poised on the edge of a decision. We can either adopt a new monkish rhythm of waking, one that leads us deeper into the intentional practices of faith, or we can wallow in the slavery of our coping mechanisms, bad habits, and addictions.

To be continued…

Join me tomorrow as I wrap up my Pandemic Supplement to The Book of Waking Up. And if you haven’t grabbed a copy of The Book of Waking Up: Experiencing the Divine Love that Reorders a Life, grab a copy. And yes, Amazon has slowed down book shipments, so considering purchasing it from Bookish, Fort Smith, or grabbing a digital copy for Kindle or Nook.