Category Archives: Monastic Rules

Winner of Otherhood’s “The Artist’s Rule” Comment Contest: Cole Matson

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For his comment on Otherhood Podcast: Episode 1 with Christine Valters Paintner, Cole Matson is hereby awarded a copy of Paintner’s book, “The Artist’s Rule.” The comments were all great, and the decision was a hard one.

The passion and devotion Matson offers in his poetry really captured my attention, though. And I’m a sucker for the old mystics.

The winning comment:

Nathan and Christine,

Thank you for this wonderful podcast. It was good for me to hear the effect that being a Benedictine oblate has had on Christine’s artistic practice, as I am considering oblation myself.

In support of contemplation bearing fruit in artistic creation (as in a motto of the Dominican Order, “to contemplate and to share the fruits of contemplation”), I thought I’d share with you a couple of the poems that arose out of a recent Ignatian silent retreat, after I had been reading John of the Cross and Lady Julian of Norwich.

“For John of the Cross”

Lord, let me love You
with the flame of ten thousand fires.

Let me love You
with a flame that dries and crackles,

burns and blackens the crust of my soul,
hides deep down in the heart of things,

to warm and beat,
flickering forth with tongues of fire

to burst through the shell of my cindered soul,
and leap to dance as love again.

Lord, make me all flame.

“For Lady Julian”

Lord, teach me to love my weaknesses
as Lady Julian loved hers,
seeing that the soiled, torn stain of our sins
blackening the white cloth of our humanity
was such a little nothing
because that cloth was worn by Christ,
who picked us up out of the Pit
and sat us next to Him at table,
with His Father and His Spirit,
all of us dazzling white,
with the wounds we ripped into our flesh
shining scars praising God’s glory,
His merciful meaning: ‘Love’.

Blessings on your work.

Cole

Runners up

I loved this, from Greene Fyre, via facebook:

To oblate in clarity, nor obtuse. To endeavor obscurity: a recluse? Divining the divine: propinquity. A pursuit sublime from antiquity.

Thanks also to Donelda Seymore, Genora W. Powell, Jaqui du Rocher, Jann Durkin and many others for your thoughtful reflections.

Contact nathan@artmonastery.org if you’re interested in joining our Artmonk Reading Group, where we’re about to go through The Artist’s Rule together.

“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.

Monks for life? « Madhushala

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Madhushala asks about the length and permanence of monastic vows in different traditions, and gets some interesting responses:

Monks for life?

There was a discussion on Twitter recently about the topic of monks disrobing. It is commonly thought that once monastic vows are taken they are for life. I did not think this was so as pretty well all the the temples of any Buddhist sect I have been to in Asia have a large number of younger people and very few older people.

My view was that a lot of the younger people come to get an education and many disrobe after that or as their families direct, hence the reason there are children there, and that many older people who do not become teachers retire.

So I put the question on Facebook to various monastic and priestly people and here are the responses I got.

Read more at Monks for life?

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).

Continue reading →

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?

Continue reading →

  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) ↩

Chapter 8 of Augustine’s Rule

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Starting on October 2nd, I’ll be doing a Jesuit retreat on the Rule of Augustine (which I’ve written about here: “Up to our necks in Augustine”).

Each day, I’ll read 1 of the 8 chapters of the Rule of Augustine:

Chapter VIII of Augustine’s Rule

Observance of the Rule Continue reading →

Chapter 5 of Augustine’s Rule

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[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 Daily Lectio. Send comments or suggested readings to nathan@artmonastery.org]

Starting on October 2nd, I’ll be doing a Jesuit retreat on the Rule of Augustine (which I’ve written about here: “Up to our necks in Augustine”).

Each day, I’ll read 1 of the 8 chapters of the Rule of Augustine:

Chapter V

The Care of Community Goods and Treatment of the Sick Continue reading →

Chapter 4 of Augustine’s Rule

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[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 Daily Lectio. Send comments or suggested readings to nathan@artmonastery.org]

Starting on October 2nd, I’ll be doing a Jesuit retreat on the Rule of Augustine (which I’ve written about here: “Up to our necks in Augustine”).

Each day, I’ll read 1 of the 8 chapters of the Rule of Augustine:

Chapter IV

Safeguarding Chastity, and Fraternal Correction Continue reading →

Chapter 1 of Augustine’s Rule

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[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 Daily Lectio. Send comments or suggested readings to nathan@artmonastery.org]

Starting on October 2nd, I’ll be doing a Jesuit retreat on the Rule of Augustine (which I’ve written about here: “Up to our necks in Augustine”).

Each day, I’ll read 1 of the 8 chapters of the Rule of Augustine:

Chapter I

Purpose and Basis of Common Life Continue reading →

Up to our necks in Augustine

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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.

Continue reading →

  1. 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. ↩
  2. 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(?) ↩