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Category Archives: Silence
Otherhood, the Podcast: Episode 1, Christine Valters Paintner and “The Artist’s Rule”
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Otherhood, the Podcast: Episode 1, Christine Valters Paintner & "The Artist's Rule" [ 27:05 | 17.43 MB ] 
Meet Otherhood, the Podcast.
In this, the first episode, I interview Christine Valters Paintner about her new book (the Artist’s Rule: Nurturing Your Creative Soul With Monastic Wisdom), the oblate life, and what it means to be both an artist and a monk.
BTW, we’re giving away a free copy of the Artist’s Rule to whomever leaves the best comment on this post. Just sayin’.
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).
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?
- 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) ↩
Baudelaire was an artmonk (kinda)
At One O’Clock in the Morning
A prayer of sorts by Charles Baudelaire:
Alone, at last! Not a sound to be heard but the rumbling of some belated and decrepit cabs. For a few hours we shall have silence, if not repose. At last the tyranny of the human face has disappeared, and I myself shall be the only cause of my sufferings.
At last, then, I am allowed to refresh myself in a bath of darkness! First of all, a double turn of the lock. It seems to me that this twist of the key will increase my solitude and fortify the barricades which at this instant separate me from the world.
Horrible life! Horrible town! Let us recapitulate the day: seen several men of letters, one of whom asked me whether one could go to Russia by a land route (no doubt he took Russia to be an island); disputed generously with the editor of a review, who, to each of my objections, replied: ‘We represent the cause of decent people,’ which implies that all the other newspapers are edited by scoundrels; greeted some twenty persons, with fifteen of whom I am not acquainted; distributed handshakes in the same proportion, and this without having taken the precaution of buying gloves; to kill time, during a shower, went to see an acrobat, who asked me to design for her the costume of a Venustra; paid court to the director of a theatre, who, while dismissing me, said to me: ‘Perhaps you would do well to apply to Z——; he is the clumsiest, the stupidest and the most celebrated of my authors; together with him, perhaps, you would get somewhere. Go to see him, and after that we’ll see;’ boasted (why?) of several vile actions which I have never committed, and faint-heartedly denied some other misdeeds which I accomplished with joy, an error of bravado, an offence against human respect; refused a friend an easy service, and gave a written recommendation to a perfect clown; oh, isn’t that enough?
Discontented with everyone and discontented with myself, I would gladly redeem myself and elate myself a little in the silence and solitude of night. Souls of those I have loved, souls of those I have sung, strengthen me, support me, rid me of lies and the corrupting vapours of the world; and you, O Lord God, grant me the grace to produce a few good verses, which shall prove to myself that I am not the lowest of men, that I am not inferior to those whom I despise.
[Part of the Daily Lectio series, named after the Benedictine tradition of lectio divina, “divine reading.” For instructions and background on the series, click here. Subscribe to the Daily LectioRSS feed. Send comments or suggested readings to nathan@artmonastery.org]
Announcing: 2011 Artmonk Retreat, Joshua Tree, CA
What
10 days, 9 nights.
Part silent meditation retreat,
Part transformational art ritual.
Vipassana, Gregorian chant, musical improvisation, ritual theater, group exercises, and more, in an incredible setting.
When
The second-ever Artmonk retreat will begin (after a concert in the Integratron by a handful of artmonks) in the late afternoon on Saturday January 8th and finish in the morning of Monday, January 17th (MLK Day), followed by a second concert at the Integratron.
Where
Integratron (“the only all-wood sound chamber in the U.S.… an acoustically perfect tabernacle and energy machine sited on a powerful geomagnetic vortex in the magical Mojave Desert”!!), Mojave Desert near Joshua Tree, California
By Whom
Organized by the Art Monastery (www.artmonastery.org) & custom-designed with renowned meditation teachers Dr. Joel and Michelle Levey (http://is.gd/fCkEe).
For Whom
Professional artists interested in deepening their practice and anyone committed to making art a more central part of their lives.
Why
In addition to being a life-changing meditation and art retreat for each of us personally, this will also help the Art Monastery continue to shape its artistic practices, define the “artmonk” way of being, and make a positive impact in the world.
Up to our necks in Augustine
On Saturday the Art Monastery, a community of artists from a wide range of spiritual traditions working to apply the tools of monasticism to art-making instead of religion, will embark on a 7-day silent retreat in the Jesuit tradition, in which the primary form of activity (and inactivity) will be to read the Rule of St. Augustine, a 1,500 year old document—only about 7 pages long—written by someone who is arguably the 3rd most influential figure in Christianity (after Jesus and Paul).
Are we masochists?!
For a while, it’s been evident that monasticism is still something very other for us artmonks. Sure, we inhabit a monastery, we’ve done meditation retreats, we’ve chanted compline every night for months, and we’ve shared meals and chores and periods of silence and selective abnegation. Yet still, the monastic experience as it has existed for thousands of years remains a strangely scary and romantic, exotic creature. And yet, if we aim to concoct our own Art Monastic rule and vows, we had better know viscerally what it is we’re dealing with.
The unique combination of Jesuit exercises—at their core a form of meditative, reflective reading that unfolds into a visualization practice—and the Rule of Augustine will give us a chance to live, if only for brief moments, according to this 1,500 year-old monastic structure. Having done so, we can choose to incorporate some of the rules into our own set, or toss the whole lot out.
Why Augustine? For one thing, his rule is shorter than the others. He gets to the point. His rule is much less specific than Benedict’s.
Additionally, Augustine was hugely influential on Western monasticism as a whole in all the right ways:
[Benedict's] sources such as John Cassian and The Master emphasize the vertical [hierarchical], whereas Benedict includes that horizontal perspective, a perspective he learned from the monastic writings of, you may be surprised to hear, Augustine—whom we always think of harshly and whom we blame for so many of the problems of modern Western Christians, not realizing that in his monastic teaching, Augustine chose a very different side of himself, and that some of Benedict’s best soundbites about pastoral sensitivity and love for one another, in fact, are stolen from Augustine. (source)
To give you a better sense of the rather daunting task we’ve set ourselves:
We’ll have as our only companion an average of 1 page of Augustine—and nothing but 1 page of Augustine—each day for seven days. Seven days, alone, with the Christian’s Christian, the ideologue’s ideologue, the dogmatist’s dogmatist. 1 Seven days, alone, with the Christian Nagarjuna 2. To me, that prospect is both frightening and fascinating.
That’s one day listening to Augustine the prude saying things like, “Although your eyes may chance to rest upon some woman or other, you must not fix your gaze upon any woman,” and another day listening to Augustine the authoritarian saying things like, “Books are to be requested at a fixed hour each day, and anyone coming outside that hour is not to receive them,” and another day listening to Augustine the zealot saying things like “Chant only what is prescribed for chant; moreover, let nothing be chanted unless it is so prescribed,” and still another day listening to Augustine the fanatic saying things like “Subdue the flesh, so far as your health permits, by fasting and abstinence from food and drink,” etc.
- One of our priest friends, who has just written his doctoral thesis on Augustine, says that Augustine never wrote a coherent, systematic theory of theology. He was usually responding, in his writing, very pragmatically to the world around him (even to atheists). The more I learn about Augustine, the more it seems like what he wrote was taken out of context in support of dogma by medieval scholars, and later served up as a comprehensive ideology by the later church. ↩
- Immediate, unscholarly parallels between the Christian philosopher born in North Africa in 354 CE, and the madhyamaka philosopher born in southern India around 150 CE: similar thoughts on the nature of time; similar thoughts on the limits of conceptual knowledge; separated in time by only a hundred or so years; similar impact on their respective growing religious movements(?) ↩
Huffington Post » Sister Joan Chittister, OSB: The Artist and Monk Are One
Here’s something that almost completely captures what we’re doing at the Art Monastery:
If, indeed, truth is beauty and beauty truth, then the monastic and the artist are one.
Monasticism, in fact, cultivates the artistic spirit. Basic to monasticism are the very qualities art demands of the artist: silence, contemplation, discernment of spirits, community and humility.
Basic to art are the very qualities demanded of the monastic: single-mindedness, beauty, immersion, praise and creativity. The merger of one with the other makes for great art; the meaning of one for the other makes for great soul.
It is in silence that the artist hears the call to raise to the heights of human consciousness those qualities no definitions ever capture. Ecstasies, pain, fluid truth, pass us by so quickly or surround us so constantly that the eyes fail to see and the heart ceases to respond.
It is in the awful grip of ineffable form or radiant color that we see into a world that is infinitely beyond our natural grasp, yet only just beyond our artist’s soul. It is contemplation that leads an artist to preserve for us forever, the essence of a thing that takes us far beyond its accidents.
Only by seeing the unseen within can the artist dredge it out of nothingness so that we can touch it, too. It is a capacity for the discernment of spirits that enables an artist to recognize real beauty from plastic pretentions to it, from cheap copies or even cheaper attempts at it.
The artist details for the world to see the one idea, the fresh form, the stunning grandeur of moments which the world has begun to take for granted or has failed even to notice, or worse, has now reduced to the mundane.
It is love for human community that puts the eye of the artist in the service of truth. Knowing the spiritual squalor to which the pursuit of less than beauty can lead us, the artist lives to stretch our senses beyond the tendency to settle for lesser things: sleazy stories instead of great literature; superficial caricatures of bland characters rather than great portraits of great souls; flowerpots instead of pottery.
Finally, it is humility that enables an artist to risk rejection and failure, disdain and derogation to bring to the heart of the world what the world too easily, too randomly, too callously overlooks.
Charles Peguy wrote, “We must always tell what we see. Above all, and this is more difficult, we must always see what we see.”
From “The Monastic Spirit and the Pursuit of Everlasting Beauty,” which appeared in The Journey and the Gift: The Ceramic Art of Brother Thomas.
via Sister Joan Chittister, OSB: The Artist and Monk Are One on Huffington Post.
Rose Marie Berger points out that the above is Sister Chittister’s response to the ceramic work of Brother Thomas Bezanson,
a Benedictine monk and ceramics artist who died in 2007. He accepted the rules of monastic solitude, and followed the advice of St. Benedict who said: “If there be craftsmen in the Monastery, [then] let them practice their crafts with all humility.” Brother Thomas spent the final years of his life at Mount St. Benedict Priory in Erie, PA, with the community of Sr. Joan Chittister. Below Sr. Joan reflects on art and the contemplative life in light of Brother Thomas’ work.
Five leadership secrets of the Trappist monk, in the Washington Post
Meath Conlan posted a July 14th Washington Post article that comes close to the point of In Otherhood, learning from monastic tradition. Head over to Conlan’s blog to read “5 leadership secrets of the Trappist monk,” by Stephen Martin.
Trappist monks, Martin points out, are some of the best social entrepreneurs on the planet. It is from this perspective that he extracts some unique lessons from Trappist tradition, each of which relates to one or more of In Otherhood‘s Elements of Monasticism.
Here’s the list (with my own summaries and comments):
- “Get (really) disciplined” – This needs no explanation [See "Elements of Monasticism » Discipline]. Some would say you discipline is a muscle you can build with practice.
- “Throw away the key” – Learn to trust the people in your community. Build a community where you can trust people. [See "Elements of Monasticism » Community]
- “Know your customer” - “[T]he work of monks ‘is not to be understood primarily as a product for consumers in a marketplace. …The fruits of the monk’s labor are sold as a means of livelihood, but they are sold to persons, real people with deep needs, not bottom-line consumers.’” [See "Elements of Monasticism » Right Livelihood]
- “Shut up” – Silence would also need no explanation, but Martin is referring more to humility and renunciation. [See "Elements of Monasticism » Silence and Renunciation]
- “Live in the margin” – Monasticism is counter-cultural, Martin suggests. “Trappists make their home in the margins. They labor in obscurity, their chosen path makes little sense to most people, and they’re criticized, sometimes even by fellow Christians, for closeting themselves away when they could be out in the world helping people with urgent problems.” Martin argues that this social status (perhaps similar to that of artists?) has helped Trappists take risks and innovate. He quotes Thomas Merton: “The logic of worldly success rests on a fallacy: the strange error that our perfection depends on the thoughts and opinions and applause of other men.” [See "Elements of Monasticism » Mirror for Society"]
Getting the questions right
Examples of the secular world learning from the world’s ancient contemplative and spiritual traditions abound. Neuroscientists, psychologists, doctors, cognitive scientists and cosmologists are learning from inner technologies of meditation and contemplative practice.
But what of the outer, visible, measurable technologies of those traditions? How are we learning from those technologies that fit into what is broadly called monasticism? And how are we impacting them? This blog asks the question:
What can the secular world learn from monasticism?
and
What can the secular world do for monastic traditions?
Some interfaith and secular groups are already learning from monasticism. For example, I live in an ex-Franciscan convent in Labro, Italy with a community of artists called the Art Monastery, where we live together as “artmonks”. We are growing our own monastic order: the International Otherhood of Artmonks.
Why can’t anyone build or be part of an “otherhood”? Any community or movement—whether seculary, interfaith, or of a single spiritual tradition—can choose to benefit from the wide array of monastic technologies that humanity has produced in the past 3000+ years.
This blog is about:
- secular monasticism,
- and high-tech monasticism,
- and art monasticism,
- and religious monasticism,
- and interfaith monasticism,
- and scientific monasticism
- and integral monasticism
- and more…
This is for:
- Artmonks and other Creative contemplatives
- “Re-monks” (part of the Christian “new monasticism” movement)
- Co-ops, cohousing and other intentional communities (member of intentional communities around the world)
- Benedictine, Augustine, Franciscan monks
- Neuroscientists, cognitive scientists, information scientists
- Doctors and medical professionals
- Secular buddhists
- Regular folks who want to add a little order to their lives
- Sufi fakirs
- Theravadan monks, Tibetan buddhist monks, Zen monks
- Advaita Vedantan monks, etc.
- …
Have an idea for an otherhood you want to start?
Monasticize your community’s future. Add a little order to your life. Grow your own Otherhood.
About the author
Nathan Rosquist is a writer and composer living as an artmonk at the Art Monastery in Labro, Italy. He has a MBA in Sustainable Community Economic Development from Bainbridge Graduate Intitute.