“It’s not Mars or Venus… but it might as well be.”
“60 Minutes” gets extremely rare access to the monasteries at Mt. Athos, perhaps one of the most sacred places in Christianity, via CBS News.
Bonus: Norris J. Chumley writes on “Bringing the Monk’s Prayers Home from Holy Mt. Athos” in Huffington Post.
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?
I’m in central Serbia this week, visiting in-laws. Tomorrow I’ll visit the bright red monastery at Žiča.
Zica is built according to the Raska school in the Romanesuque style. The monastery was originally painted red in the tradition of the Mount Athos monasteries. There are few frescoes dating back to the 13th century remaining in the lateral choir recesses. Most of those existing today date from the early 14th Century. The Church of the Ascension of our Lord is a single nave church build in four sections, the third rising up to a high octagonal dome.
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:
This is for:
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.
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.