Category Archives: Self Sufficiency

“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.

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?

Economies of Merit at play in Qinghai

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Last year, the Taer Monastery reported ticket sales revenues of 36 million yuan (US$5.48 million). The money was used to pay every monk about 10,000 yuan in living allowances and to maintain the monastery buildings.

In 2010, the per capita net income of farmers and herdsmen in Qinghai was 3,863 yuan, according to the National Bureau of Statistics.

Besides allowances, the monks can earn extra income by chanting prayers for families of Tibetan Buddhist believers.

Link to Shanghai Daily

When I visited Chinese and Tibetan monasteries in 2003, it was clear that technology had hit, and that tourism was big business. I don’t fault these monks at all for owning cellphones or surfing the Internet. Or for earning roughly 1,500 US dollars a year, for that matter. Good on ‘em.

But it will be interesting to see how it shifts their relationship to the secular world. What do those herdsmen think?

There are patterns of economic growth and reform in so many traditions, from wealth to poverty and back again. The cause of this cycle–that vows of renunciation of wealth are be viewed as meritorious, and thereby become a source of profit–seems unsustainable.

Can monasteries justify continuing to operate in the black market of merit, pretending to dwell outside of the ecosystem of the “worldly”?

Rather than make claims to renunciation, maybe it would be better to pursue another merit strategy, or a source of revenue that doesn’t involve merit. Or maybe that just gets us back to the blind pursuit of profit–without values–that many monastics are trying to avoid in the first place.

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) ↩