Monastic?

Below and off and on I have mentioned New Monastic movement, and gradually I have been drawn to the balance of missional-monastic for the vision of where we might go with our community here. A lot of this might depend on some discerning and dreaming we are doing around a possible new and much larger space, an old church building near us, but more with the desire to be an urban monastery or house of hospitality in this abandoned place of Empire we live in, as a way of creating a culture counter to the one about us, bringing back daily communal open to all public prayer, sharing of possessions and giving of them away, and our working together in service beyond ourselves. However, I am not sure we will become monastic in the sense of sharing living space on a daily basis with other members of the community, as is the monastic custom both old and new. Who knows what the future holds, but one way to move in this direction is to seek to live monastically, even if not as monastics. A recent read here in this regard is Karen Sloan's Flirting With Monasticism: Finding God on Ancient Paths. The main take-away that moves beyond the specifics of her own story is that we individually and communally can benefit from learning with and from and taking into our disciplines what the various traditions of monasticism have given us; there may be much that is not transferrable, but it is a conversation to become engaged with. I hope to revisit it here more soon. Oh, and The New Friars by Scott Bessenecker is one I might have mentioned too that has a helpful and different take on missional-monastic, and how friars, as opposed to monks, have been more popularly seen as out on their own or in pairs working in the world instead of, or in addition to, time withdrawn from the world. It is all transformational though.

This Advent will be eventful though as a few seeds and steps begin.

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