Category Archives: Community

“the simple way” » 12 Marks of New Monasticism

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Through a google alert pointing me to this article, I just stumbled on The Simple Way, “a community in inner-city Philadelphia that has helped birth and connect radical faith communities around the world.”

I am looking forward to exploring more. But first, I love this clear exposition of their values (how many elements of monasticism can you count?):

  1. Relocation to the abandoned places of Empire.
  2. Sharing economic resources with fellow community members and the needy among us.
  3. Hospitality to the stranger
  4. Lament for racial divisions within the church and our communities combined with the active pursuit of a just reconciliation.
  5. Humble submission to Christ’s body, the church.
  6. Intentional formation in the way of Christ and the rule of the community along the lines of the old novitiate.
  7. Nurturing common life among members of intentional community.
  8. Support for celibate singles alongside monogamous married couples and their children.
  9. Geographical proximity to community members who share a common rule of life.
  10. Care for the plot of God’s earth given to us along with support of our local economies.
  11. Peacemaking in the midst of violence and conflict resolution within communities along the lines of Matthew 18.
  12. Commitment to a disciplined contemplative life.

via about the simple way » 12 Marks of New Monasticism.

Tolle on Collective Egos vs. Enlightened Collectives

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How have the various monastic traditions embodied the two possibilities that Tolle writes about below?

“How hard is it to live with yourself? One of the ways in which the ego attempts to escape the unsatisfactoriness of personal self hood is to enlarge and strengthen its sense of self by identifying with a group—a nation, political party, corporation, institution, sect, club, gang, football team.

In some cases the personal ego seems to dissolve completely as someone dedicates his or her life to working selflessly for the greater good of the collective without demanding personal rewards, recognition, or aggrandizement. What a relief to be freed of the dreadful burden of personal self. The members of the collective feel happy and fulfilled, no matter how hard they work, how many sacrifices they make. They appear to have gone beyond ego. The question is: Have they truly become free, or has the ego simply shifted from the personal to the collective?

A collective ego manifests the same characteristics as the personal ego, such as the need for conflict and enemies, the need for more, the need to be right against others who are wrong, and so on. Sooner or later, the collective will come into conflict with other collectives, because it unconsciously seeks conflict and it needs opposition to define its boundary and thus its identity. Its members will then experience the suffering that inevitably comes in the wake of any ego-motivated action. At that point, they may wake up and realize that their collective has a strong element of insanity.

It can be painful at first to suddenly wake up and realize that the collective you had identified with and worked for is actually insane. Some people at that point become cynical or bitter and henceforth deny all values, all worth. This means that they quickly adopted another belief system when the previous one was recognized as illusory and therefore collapsed. They didn’t face the death of their ego but ran way and reincarnated into a new one.

A collective ego is usually ore unconscious than the individuals that make up that ego. For example, crowds (which are temporary collective egoic entities) are capable of committing atrocities that the individual away from the crowd would not be. Nations not infrequently engage in behavior that would be immediately recognizable as psychopathic in an individual.

As the new consciousness emerges, some people will feel called upon to form groups that reflect the enlightened consciousness. These groups will not be collective egos. The individuals who make up these groups will have no need to define their identity through them. They no longer look to any form to define who they are. Even if the members that make up those groups are not totally free of ego yet, there will be enough awareness in them to recognize the ego in themselves or in others as soon as it appears. However, constant alertness is required since the ego will try to take over and reassert itself in any way it can.

Dissolving the human ego by bringing it into the light of awareness—this will be one of the main purposes of these groups, whether they be enlightened businesses, charitable organizations, schools, or communities of people living together. Enlightened collectives will fulfill an important function in the arising of the new consciousness. Just as egoic collectives pull you into unconsciousness and suffering, the enlightened collective can be a vortex for consciousness that will accelerate the planetary shift.

—from “A New Earth”, by Eckhart Tolle, via here.

SHARE San Francisco

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I’ll be here next weekend (May 7):

SHARE San Francisco, Saturday, May 7th, Hub SoMa

SHARE San Francisco is convening local leaders on Saturday May 7th for a day of connection, conversation, and action to strengthen the Bay Area as a platform for sharing.

Why SHARE SF?

Cities promise broad access to the resources citizens need to create great lives and contribute to the common good. Unfortunately, this promise is rarely realized.

However, an unprecedented opportunity to strive for freedom, prosperity and sustainability through sharing has emerged due to new technologies and sharing business models, intensifying urbanization, the empowerment of women and minorities, and a new generation’s preference for access versus ownership.

With this opportunity in mind, SHARE SF invites you to explore how to strengthen the Bay Area as a platform for sharing through an all-day unconference.

via Shareable: Announcing SHARE San Francisco.

See you there?

5/5/11 in Berkeley: “Artmonk Sangha: the Bay Area’s Ritual Laboratory for Artmonks”

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Based on practices that we have been developing at the January 2010 & 2011 Artmonk Retreats in the Mojave Desert, these weekly (or semi-weekly) meetups will provide an opportunity for anyone in the Bay Area who is interested to explore the path of the artmonk.

DEFINITIONS:

  • “Artmonk”: someone who dwells (alone or in community) at the intersection of contemplation, creativity, and activism.
  • “Sangha”: the Pali/Sanskrit word for a Buddhist or Jain community, and refers either to a community of monks, or to a broader community of practicing individuals.
  • “Artmonk Sangha”: a practicing community of artmonks.

WHEN & WHERE

May 5th, 5:30-7:30pm

1798 Scenic Avenue

Doug Adams Gallery/Badè Museum, in Holbrook Hall,

Pacific School of Religion, Berkeley, CA

http://goo.gl/AR92d

Contact Nathan @ (510) 520-4747

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Contemplating Second Life

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It’s been years since I stopped into Second Life, but here are a few spots for contemplatively inclined avatars:

Saint Francis Church and Monastery

“Saint Francis Church and Monastery offers a serene and quiet location perfect for personal reflection, meditation, prayer, or a religious service. Enjoy the stunning beauty of this tranquil island and take time to meander through the lush surroundings.” Visit this location.

Saint Catherine’s Monastery

“Based on its real-world counterpart in Sinai, Egypt, the monastery includes icons and a Library as well as the main Katholicon and the Mosaic of the Transfiguration.” Visit this location. Continue reading →

9/10

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Via A Vow of Conversion:

They say that in any average monastery nine out of ten who come to try the life end up leaving. It’s all about handling the pressure of interpersonal relationships. Either you give up and go away or you stay and make it work. Ultimately there is only one way to make the monastic life work—by demonstrating the willingness to resolve conflict by forgiving others, asking their forgiveness, reconciling with them, and by humbling yourself even when you think you are right. This process does not take place in every monastery, and as a result the monasteries which are healthy are very, very healthy, while the monasteries that go bad go very, very bad. In either case, they serve as an example to the parish, either a good example or a bad example.

What monastic life, at its best, has to offer the parish is a vision of what the Kingdom is like when we make our relationships with other persons work, because ultimately healthy relationships – with other human persons and with God – are the only thing that matters.

—Monk Cosmas Shartz in the current issue of In Communion, journal of the Orthodox Peace Fellowship of the Protection of the Mother of God, February2011, p. 35, also available here.

Our English word “decimate” comes from the Latin for “to remove a tenth“. Do we have a word for “to leave a tenth behind”? It’s still a pretty bleak figure.

Shartz’s is one view of the relationship of the orthodox monastery and the parish—the lay religious. Monasteries do the hard work of living together in community, and the people watch in awe. Thus the separation and the covenant between the monastic and secular are a fairly clean, with only images and illusions (and money and prayer) passing between.

What’s next?

Creating an Art Monastery

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Living in intentional community is not for everyone—the idea triggers an autoimmune response in some people, for whom it might signify the sacrifice of personal autonomy and individuality—but once you develop a taste for the stuff, it doesn’t fade. I unabashedly love it.

Since I began this blog-inquiry into monasticism just six months ago, dissecting Taoism, Vedanta, Eastern and Western Christianity, as well as the various vehicles of Buddhism into what I have called the elements of monasticism, community is an element I haven’t written about directly much at all. Yet it figures in my mind as an important piece of what all monasticisms are aiming at. For those individuals who dwell in abbeys, ashrams, friaries, priories, sketes, lavras, mathas, mandirs, koils, gompas, lamaseries, wats, viharas, community is a powerful spiritual practice.

So we’re making a monastery.

No, it’s not the one pictured above—the famous Cluny Abbey, founded in 910 by William the First of Aquitaine—which I include in this post because, although it grew into something massive (such a symbol of opulence that it was destroyed during the French Revolution), it started out modestly enough. William donated his Burgundy hunting preserve and an abbey was born.

Starting out even more modestly, we are making an Art Monastery in the San Francisco Bay Area.

I met Art Monastery Project co-founders Betsy McCall and Christopher Fülling in April of 2008, a few months after they had moved to Italy to start the pilot Art Monastery, and a couple months before I received an MBA in Sustainable Community Economic Development from BGI. I volunteered for the Art Monastery Project in Italy for 17 months out of the next two years.

Last October, I moved to the Bay Area to be with my fiancée, Phoebe, and to start a new Art Monastery here. Since then, between the 8-night Artmonk Retreat and four chapter meetings in Berkeley and San Francisco, after conversations with Phoebe, Joel, Michelle, Tom, Nancy, Annette, Derek, David, Lesley, Eden, and a dozen others, I have a rough idea for how to make it happen.

As I learned in Italy, birthing a self-sustaining community of monastically-inspired artists is an almost unbearably hard and tortuous process. Yet, as far as I and a few others are concerned, there’s nothing more valuable, nothing worthier of our time and our steady effort (aside from, perhaps, practices of contemplation and art-making).

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Economies of Merit

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In many monastic and religious traditions, ethical and spiritual “merit” gets traded like a commodity.1

Nuns and monks agree to live a certain way, abiding by a certain kind of behavior (which their society has deemed the most virtuous or ethical), and in exchange they don’t have to earn their own money to stay alive, but can focus on loftier or more personally pressing matters. What the monastics bring to the bartering table is merit—a substance, not much more abstract than money, that your good deeds earn you and which earns you future spiritual favor (a trip to heaven, a better rebirth, decreased negative karma, etc.). How a monk or nun lives effectively earns them points, which, for their purposes, will be directly or indirectly useful in attaining whatever it is they are seeking. When monastics follow the rules and earn a surplus of merit, which they agree to share with each other, with laypeople (alive and dead), and other beings, they earn their worldly keep.

This merit benefits the surrounding society in a number of ways. Directly, lay folk ask the merit-rich monks, nuns and priests to pray for them and for their (living or dead) relatives, and to perform rites and ceremonies for them. Indirectly, the knowledge that the monks you give alms to exist as exemplars of (your definition of) purity and holiness, encapsulated in special buildings more beautiful than any, is a gift.

On a broader level, monasteries themselves agree to uphold and enforce merit-earning behavior, and are given land, buildings, and special rights. Monasteries are merit-engines.

So which came first in monastic traditions around the world: morality, merit, or money?

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  1. For example, the 15th and 16th century papacy’s practice of selling spiritual indulgences: “the Church drew from the the treasury of merits accumulated by the good works of the saints, and in return the recipient made a contribution to the Church. A voluntary and popular arrangement, the practice allowed the Church to raise money for financing crusades and building cathedrals and hospitals. At first applied only to penalties imposed by the Church in this life, by Luther’s time indulgences were being granted to remit penalties imposed by God in the afterlife, including immediate release from purgatory. With indulgences effecting even the remission of sins, the sacrament of penance itself was seemingly compromised.” (Richard Tarnas, in Passion of the Western Mind) ↩

The Ages of Western Monasticism

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From P. Langdale Hough at Plumblines:

From Walled Towns (1919), by Ralph Adams Cram (courtesy of Schmitz). Pages 34 – 35:

At the beginning of the Christian the impulse was personal, the individual was the unit, and the result was the anchorites and hermits, each isolating himself a hidden mountain cave, a hut in the desert, or if his fancy took this eccentric, on the top of a lonely column, like St. Simon Stylites. With St. Benedict the group became the unit, a sort of artificial family either of men or of women, as the case might be. He himself began as a hermit in the cleft of a far mountain, but within his own lifetime his original impulse was overridden and the new communal or group life came into being, though each monastery or convent was quite autonomous and self-contained. Five centuries later (or four to speak more exactly) began the Cluniac reform, which was followed by the Cistercian movement, and here, though the old Benedictine mode was followed at first, in a brief time came the differentiation, for now all the houses of one order were united under a centralizing and coordinating force. Here we have the State as the parallel of the new scheme. Latest of all, in other five centuries, came still a new model, the army, with the Society of Jesus as its perfect exponent. So we have at almost exact five century intervals four models of monasticism: the individual, the family, the State, and the army. A fifth is now due; what will be its form?

Hough responds:

How does Cram’s historiographical theory make sense of the small monastic communities found in the letters of St. Jerome? Or of the eremitical revival which accompanied the rise of Cluny in the 11th century? Or the conflict between Cluniacs and the Cistercians and their disagreements regarding centralized governance? Or the representative democracy of the Dominican constitution of the 13th century that was deeply grounded in familial relationships? Or the rise of the Military Orders during the era of “State” monastic scheme?  Or how the Jesuits and the Carmelites could share a common spirituality yet pursue very different forms of religious life? While Cram’s thesis is an interesting one, any further reflection on the development of monastic life in the West necessarily requires one to reject it.

Hough’s informed response takes some of the juice out of Cram’s monastic teleology, but a new kind of monasticism nevertheless seems to have been cooking for the past fifty or so years. In keeping with Cram’s “the individual, the family, the State, and the army,” to what shall we compare it?

The marketplace? The network? The city? The farm? The artist colony?